


Right Down the Middle

by chels0792



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-02-20 10:25:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13144683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chels0792/pseuds/chels0792
Summary: The sun had risen, but the night hadn’t ended. It had stayed with him, laid beside his marrow where the memory could creep into his foremost thoughts when he was weakest, when he was lonely, when he kicked off the sheets to the ghosts of fingers that had once bruised him. He hadn’t seen much of Ivan in over a year, and the discomfort between them was his own fault. That Russia had come to the party at all had been a gracious gesture.The holiday-flavored continuation of the Toucher Doux storyline. Please note that from this point forward the events described deviate from cannon events; I will keep the characters as cannon as I'm able.





	1. Sobranie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that as of 1\1\2018 this story was revised. I realized that I had published the second-to-final edit rather than the final edit of the story. 
> 
> Thank you for your patience. I suggest giving it a second read. The edits do make a great difference, especially in the third chapter.

The week between Christmas and the eve of the new year was a week of celebration and old-fashioned revelry for the citizens of America’s New York City. Relatives jogged to their families with rosy cheeks and open arms; couples shopped in windows brightly lit with sparkling holiday displays. Tinsel glimmered in the darkness as night fell over the streets and lamplight illuminated footsteps along the avenue. Wet gray snow clung to tires and the windowsills of the penthouse in Manhattan where the wall of glass fogged with the warmth inside. 

White lights danced on their strings against the panes in the dining room, clicking at wait staff in white aprons and professional blacks who threaded through the milling crowd with plates of hors d'oeuvres and bubbling champagne. Platters of sweet and savory bites steamed the warming scents of yeast and sugar into the air; cocktails clinked. Laughter, conversation, and Austria’s fingers on the keys of the salon piano mingled into a cacophony of festivity that echoed into the spacious kitchen. 

Alfred twisted his hip so a waitress could pass with a silver tray of goodies balanced on her palm, lifting his hands in a friendly gesture so she could squeeze past the island counter untouched. As she passed, he snagged a crispy d’oeuvre from her platter. 

Alfred crunched down on a crisp pocket of goat’s cheese and raspberry, wiping his fingers on his pants and glancing furtively to ensure that no one caught him brushing sugar from his slacks. The olive in his martini rolled on its plastic white toothpick. 

His penthouse brimmed with nationheads and kitchen staff and music and light and cheer. The turnout was the best he’d ever had, Alfred thought, and of the guests documented to arrive, only Russia had failed to appear. Alfred thought he hid his surprise and disappointment well while the guests arrived. 

But he needed to start the party, he thought. He couldn’t afford to wait any longer for Ivan, who he wasn’t sure still planned to come anyway.

It was, he thought with pride, his best party yet. His first party had been awesome, there could be no doubt; but this year he'd outdone himself, and he knew it. He'd spared no expense on the decor, on the music, on the excess of food and staff and the dozens of beers on tap and bottles behind the bar. The bartender was one of the best in New York City; the cooks he'd borrowed from France. The staff was trained at the best butler academies in the world. It was perfect. 

He retrieved his Manhattan from the island counter and smoothed a hand over his hair, catching his fingers in gel. His guests had arrived in their best evening wear, in jewels and finery and with the most respectful greetings for the bellman at the door. Even China had worn one of his best hanfu with the delicate red trim, and had bowed to Alfred after Alfred bowed to him. 

The penthouse was filled to capacity, and he was ready to begin if only his final guest would show himself. He’d make one last round, Alfred thought, just check the corners of the rooms one more time. It’d be rude to leave a guest without a greeting, after all. 

His shoes, shined and water-sealed, thumped on the oak panels beneath his feet in a merry cadence around pockets of gathered nations as he strode back into the party. 

At the dining room table, weighted by its burden of food, Ukraine caught his sleeve and gushed her thanks for his invitation. Belarus, draped in a heavy gown and jewels, gave him an icy nod at her shoulder. Alfred assured both of the Siberian sisters that he was delighted to have them in attendance, and to call him if they needed anything. 

He gave Latvia a thumbs-up through the terrace window as the little nationhead splashed water from the glass-bottomed pool all over Moldova’s pressed slacks. Latvia waved and gleefully splashed Moldova again.

In the salon, Austria tilted his head in time to the music from behind the shined grand, and Hungary laid a hand on his slim shoulder, swaying to the melody. Alfred gave her a respectful nod and a warm smile as he passed. 

No Russia. Ivan wasn’t invited to many parties. Alfred had thought he’d be at the door with bells on, especially since he had a very illegal way of knowing where his sisters would be. Alfred had thought that ensuring Ukraine’s attendance would ensure Ivan’s attendance as well. 

He sipped his drink, trying to prevent his eyebrows from knotting as he gazed over the salon and theater from the decorated archway. And he had thought, after the last time they’d talked, that Ivan would at least want to see him again. 

The alcohol soured in his stomach unpleasantly, and he frowned guiltily at the wall. Or maybe not, after the way Alfred had behaved. 

He passed the bar, and Gilbert startled him from his reverie. “Al!”

Italy abandoned Germany’s arm, sliding off of his seat to greet him. 

“Hey! You guys look great!” Alfred wrapped Feliciano in one arm and squeezed, and Feliciano pressed a kiss to one cheek and then the other. “Did Seborga make it?” 

Ludwig nodded over Alfred’s shoulder at the salon loveseat, where Seborga and Romano shared a heated conversation over Spain’s nap. 

“Ah.” Alfred said, and Italy returned to Germany’s side. “Excellent.”

Alfred tapped the bar with a fingernail and said to the tender, “This guy is a real stickler for the tap. Let me know what he says about my beers.” To Prussia he added, “I need you to try them all and tell me what you think.”

He clapped the cheerful old man on the shoulder and thought that Gilbert had a way of putting him at ease. 

The billiards table was empty. England hadn’t finished enough of his drink to challenge Australia to a match, but when he did—Alfred thought with a roll of his eyes—he’d be picking pool cues out of the tree in the corner. 

Alfred grinned. Japan sat with his feet propped on the large theater couch and his laptop warming his lap with some obscure anime. He wore the expensive headphones Alfred had gifted him the moment he’d walked in the door and was dead to the party. 

China draped himself over the cushions, a spectacle in crimson and black. The lights glinted in his dark eyes, and his pale skin reflected white in the windows. 

Alfred caught his eye. Yao gestured with one manicured finger that Alfred was to approach. 

Alfred tugged playfully at Kiku’s leg as he passed, startling his shy friend. 

He bowed low to Yao and his children, who had wasted no time in waiting on him head to toe from the moment they’d arrived. “Is the evening to your liking, Mister China? We’ll be starting the festivities as soon as I’m done with my rounds.”

“An elaborate event for a young luxury nation, Mister America. You outdid yourself again.” Yao said with a smile. “But I admit to some surprise. Gossip has it that you two are mending your ties. Or did we leave him in the cold again?” 

“Russia was invited, and he sent back an RSVP.” Alfred straightened, frowning. “But I don’t know where he is. I think everybody else is here.”

Yao cocked his head, glossy hair catching the light. He traced his gossamer sleeve with a finger. “I said nothing about Mister Russia.”

Alfred’s gut tightened. He gave Yao a flat white smile. “Well, I made sure Russia knows he’s welcome this year, and he’s the only one not here. I hoped he would take the invitation. This would be the first year we had everyone important, wouldn’t it?”

Yao eyed him thoughtfully. Alfred felt distinctly naked. 

Austria played a sweeping cadence. As the music blossomed, Yao said, “Perhaps you could use a moment to yourself, Mister America. I think cold air is wonderful for curing a bad mood.”

Yao gestured with a tilt of his head, and Alfred eyed the dewy glass of the southern terrace. The balcony was lit dimly with string lights. For an instant he imagined he could see a tall shadow standing just out of sight. 

He thanked him, and China lost interest in sending Vietnam in pursuit of Hong Kong, who shouted at Iceland from somewhere deeper in the apartment. 

The terrace handle was frosted with the late hour and the chill of the season. Alfred closed the rubber seal with a heel to protect his guests from December. 

He nodded at Japan, who caught his eye and returned the gesture in a silent promise to make sure that Alfred was not locked outside. 

The piano was muted by the glass, but Alfred could hear Poland and Latvia shouting at Lithuania from the other side of the penthouse. The reflecting pool at the edge of the balcony steamed into the darkened horizon, lit with ten thousand lights from the city below. 

The terrace rail was cold and wet, and Alfred felt snow melt into his sleeves. His exhale fogged the air and died on the breeze that curled around the building. He straightened his collar for whatever small warmth the fabric might provide. 

Alfred had revisited the night they’d come to terms with their history a hundred times, examined every detail for justification for what he’d done. The sun had risen, but the night hadn’t ended, Alfred thought. It had stayed with him, laid beside his marrow where the memory could creep into his foremost thoughts when he was weakest, when he was lonely, when he was too hot and kicked off the sheets so he could enjoy himself to that low whisper in his ear and to the ghosts of fingers that had once bruised him. He couldn’t have dreamed how gentle Ivan could be, and it was the shock of gentle hands that had undone him. 

He wondered if Ivan had known. Wrapped in his striped blankets and hidden beneath his stifling pillowcase, Alfred had gritted his teeth and admitted to himself that what he’d once fantasized was exactly what Ivan had done. He’d trapped him, pinned him, tied him, and then treated him carefully, with a kind of reverence that had disarmed him completely.

Ivan had kept him in that helpless place for hours, Alfred thought for the hundredth time. And he had done nothing to stop him. 

He blew out a breath and ran his fingers through his hair, rolled his martini glass in two fingers. The alcohol danced in the glass. Was he really still that much of a child?

“Amerika?”

Alfred jolted, slipping on the icy concrete. He caught the railing before he landed on his ass. 

Cold wind brushed Ivan’s snowy hair from his eyes like a friendly caress. His suit jacket caught the breeze as he turned from the city skyline and the white bulbs on the terrace rail caught his profile, igniting wax-colored hair and the arch of his cheekbone. 

“Hey.” Alfred’s stomach jumped, and he adjusted his footing. “There you are.”

Snow piled against the pale blade of his hand, bare, and thudded onto the balcony floor as he approached. Ivan cocked his head to study his face, and Alfred wondered if he noticed the circles under his eyes or that his cheekbones were maybe a little more prominent than they had been the last time they’d—talked. 

He gave him a smile and shrugged in a way he hoped was charming, catching himself before he could tilt his head and smirk. “I thought you shit out on me, man.” 

Ivan’s smile was plastic. The expression failed to meet his eyes. Alfred thought that he was looking at something that only pretended to be a man. Now more than ever, he knew Ivan’s depths, and to see less than his honesty was disturbing. 

Ivan was not pleased with him. Anxiety bubbled in his gut. He lifted his chin and cleared his throat. “It’s, uh. It’s good to see you.” 

“You as well, Alfred. I had thought perhaps you were unwell.” 

Alfred hated that he was in unfamiliar territory. He struggled with himself and drooped. 

He sighed. “You must have snuck in. I looked for you, man. When did you get here?” 

“I was early.” Ivan bunched the fabric of his scarf beneath his jaw. “You looked busy. Thank you for inviting me. I’m glad you did.”

The silence that followed was neither awkward nor completely comfortable, and Alfred thought that was exactly what he’d expected. He hadn’t seen much of Ivan in over a year, and the discomfort between them was his own fault. That Russia had come to the party at all had been a gracious gesture. 

It was comforting to know that Ivan didn’t seem to know what to say either. Alfred sighed and laid his forearms on the railing beside him, balancing his cocktail in both hands. “How was your flight?”

Ivan came to rest on the railing beside him. “Long.” 

Alfred sipped his drink, willing the alcohol to warm him. Ivan’s shoulder was dusted with unmelting snow. Alfred wondered if his temperature also fluctuated with the seasons. He had suspected as much many years ago, but the fighting began before he had a chance to ask. 

He lowered his head, cocked a hip, and scratched his scalp in thought. The Cold War had chilled the world, but had heated the rivalry between them into something that was neither friendly nor healthy. Each had been shocked to meet the other’s power head-on and each outraged by how well-matched they had become. Alfred had fought for his family and his vision, and Ivan had fought with bitterness, because Alfred had raised a fist.

Or, Alfred thought as he sipped in the uncomfortable silence, because he had always wanted to fight him. Ivan had confessed his thoughts the morning after, admitted that in some way he had always hated Alfred and had wanted to hurt him. 

At the time, he’d not been in the right mind to be angry, Alfred thought, but he had been after. On the flight home, sore but healing, he’d wrapped the hood of his sweater tightly around his head and pretended to sleep while he fought the confusing sense of betrayal that crushed him—among dozens of other emotions which blitzed him en force—and had cursed them both for their idiocy. That horrid pain stayed with him for weeks, then months after their encounter, and he hadn’t tried to contact Ivan once while it lived. 

Christmas had come, and Alfred hadn’t sent a birthday card—not that he often did, anyway. Then New Year’s Day, and Alfred pretended to forget him. He celebrated Valentine’s Day with Mattie, and held out for one more week before he had to admit—kicking and screaming, but admit nevertheless—that he was more hurt than angry. He had always admired Russia, had always liked Ivan; to know that Ivan had kept such appalling thoughts behind his smile—Cold War or no—had offended him more than he thought it could. 

Ivan stared at the warped shadows on the face of the building across the street. “You have lost weight.” 

Alfred snorted a white cloud into the air. “Please. I eat McDonald’s every day. If I lose weight I’ll put out an official statement to celebrate.” 

“If I notice, the others will notice as well.”

Alfred glanced up at him and away. Ivan had worn a white shirt beneath his black suit coat, and pastel colors only ever made him bigger. His hair belied its softness as if shifted in the breeze. 

He looked away. “That’s fine. We’re just here to have a good time.”

Ivan nodded. He returned his gaze to the polluted sky. 

The boy’s economy was healthy, he thought, more so than even in previous decades and absolutely more so than his own. He was autonomous enough to hold sanctions over other countries while suffering very little repercussion. His administration was appalling, shocking to every other nation—but Alfred’s appearance was not his customary tongue-in-cheek show of absurdity brought about by poor governing. He was under considerable stress, Ivan thought, but Alfred had a way of hiding his pains. 

As he had evidenced, Ivan thought bitterly, when communications between them suddenly fell cold the year before. Alfred had left his home upon their poignant rendezvous with a blush in his cheeks and a weight on his back, using his phone on the street to ask why his brother had called while he’d been gone. 

Alfred had not talked much with him since that night, and Ivan lived in the constant fear that he had somehow injured the boy. He had racked his mind more than a dozen times as the American fields and farmland enjoyed their hottest months of the year for some mistake he’d made, some oversight, some injury Alfred had managed to hide from him; but he had always found nothing, and cursed himself. 

They had exchanged no more than a handful of messages the past year, and that alone was strange, a reflection of the second decade of the Cold War. Ivan’s home fell cold, empty without Alfred’s sunny influence. The curtains sat dusted over the windows, unopened in the mornings with Alfred’s first cup. A tub of ice cream took to frostbite in his freezer; he forgot to throw the tub away. 

Their visits had never been mandatory, never scheduled with the same pen he used to schedule meetings, but Alfred knew not to stay away for longer than a few weeks at a time. He had become dependent on those visits like an addict to a drug, Ivan thought, and regretted losing the drug the same an addict might. He began to count the passing of the months in weekends he should have spent with Alfred, by the evenings when Alfred should have appeared on his doorstep, and the days grew shorter and the nights longer and more drunken by the month. 

Awkward feelings matured into evasion, and the disconcerting space grew between them. Ivan became convinced that he had uttered the wrong words, laid his fingers in the wrong tender places. 

Life moved quickly. A month passed since their thrilling intimate encounter, then two… and then nine. Another summer came and went for the rest of the world, and Ivan uncertainly watched it go. 

He lowered his head and put himself to work. The Kremlin’s maintenance staff took a week off to spend with their children. The chandeliers glittered with a fresh coat of polish. The varnished floors reflected his coat down to the stitching. Every hinge was oiled, every corner dusted and swept. 

He turned to his people when the Kremlin bored him. Alfred promised him on more than one occasion that his people would welcome him if he walked the streets, or would at least give him a smile. With nothing else to do, Ivan took the chance one aching afternoon, and took a long, rainy walk. 

A group of children offered him a stick of pink chalk to draw beside them in the street. Ivan reasoned that they had no idea who he was, and played. When he left, one of the children called goodbye by his nation name. 

He aided construction and the police, distracted himself for a while with joy. But human beings were fleeting, and Alfred was not in Moscow, and Ivan could feel emptiness where a real friend had been. 

He had learned in dealing with his sisters not to approach wounded siblings, especially when he had spilled the blood; so Ivan kept his distance, distracted himself, allowed Alfred the space he so urgently wanted to fill. He’d sent Alfred his customary birthday gift, held himself back from penning more than the usual congratulations, and tried to occupy himself with work and his growing lucidity. He considered it mature conduct of the situation and congratulated himself. But he was left unsatisfied, and a gnawing ache settled in his chest beside the uncomfortable knowledge that Alfred had a talent for making him feel like an unwashed whore. 

Then September came, and a general assembly meeting followed. Ivan knew it would be easy to pretend he was fine when the tables were filled with the nations he’d known for hundreds of years. Some had called him and his sister Kiev, many years ago; some had called him Tartar behind his back, and Mongolia had never liked that; for some time after that, he was called Moscow by those who didn’t know what to name the empire that refused to die in the wasteland. The name had become something of a joke, if he was to understand, an attempt at humor to disguise the disquiet he could hear in their voices. To the rest of the table, and the youngest, he was Mister Russia. 

America knew him as Ivan, had earned Vanya, but no one knew that.

No one knew how his stomach filled with lead on the walk down the hallway where America could be heard to shout over the din. He didn’t know how America would behave, how Alfred had decided to feel about what he’d done. He feared the worst, and was annoyed by the pain in his chest which pulsed over his lifeless heart. 

He’d been prepared to scour the boy’s body language for clues, but as the first speaker took the microphone, Alfred defied the turned heads of the crowded room to make deliberate eye contact. Every muscle in Ivan’s body relaxed at once. He turned to face the front before his smile could become sincere. At least, he had thought, Alfred had not abandoned him in his mind. 

He fought with himself and won. He forced himself to be content with listening and observing, and with the gratification he felt when Alfred had clicked his pen to initiate a conversation during intermission. They used a private language and the chaos to make their plans. 

It was an old dialect, and soothing in its use. Alfred had suggested a quick consultation in private, and Ivan was thrilled to agree to a rendezvous. He was almost surprised to see Alfred where he expected him. He had departed the UN building in a fantastic mood, and Alfred with a spring in his step.

The end of his boy's sunny visits carried a significance that Ivan was not willing to accept. He had decided, hiding Alfred's hand-delivered invitation in his coat on the way to the airport, that he would attend the party if only to convince Alfred to return to Moscow again. To press his administration to allow his attendance to the party required thirty seconds and only one convincing argument. His administration was more desperate than they liked to appear. 

Alfred cleared his throat uneasily. Ivan couldn’t find anything nice to say. 

The air between them had a voltage, Alfred thought, like an electric fence wired to kill. Ivan was angry. He needed to be more careful, for God’s sake. Ivan could pick him up and toss him right over the terrace if he wasn’t paying attention. 

He lowered his head, cursing himself for his awkward behavior. In the time before the Cold War, when they shared their company in some sense of the word, Alfred had imagined Ivan’s hands on him, and in his young, selfish daydreams they had been demanding. The thought had scared him—he was not that kind of man—and he’d stopped dreaming long before Ivan had turned on him. To even pretend to bargain with his autonomous heart had been a sin in his own mind, as if the universe could hear and might oblige. 

Alfred rubbed the back of his neck with cold fingers. Maybe it had, a few years late; and boy, wasn’t that a cheery Christmas thought. 

Alfred tilted his glass to watch the alcohol move, and the light from the decorations lit the underside of his golden jaw, flashed in his bright eyes. Ivan’s heart skipped with the boy so close, and Ivan commanded the damn unwanted thing be still. 

Ivan had wondered what conclusions Alfred must have found within himself during his extended period of silence; he assumed that Alfred had revealed to his family in a shameful, tearful explosion his exploits, and had been too cowed by their responses to speak with Ivan again. To discover that the boy continued to keep secret his obsession had been frustrating, but Ivan held his tongue. 

After September the boy revived their stilted communications, but did not visit Moscow again: not, he insisted over the phone, because he didn’t want to, but because he was too busy at home. 

It was, Ivan thought as Alfred played with the olive in his drink, a very thin line of bullshit. Alfred was busy, to be sure, but had never been too busy to visit. “My sister is here.” 

Alfred finally met his eyes. He set his cocktail on the railing and rubbed his palms together against the cold. “Both of them. And the Baltics.”

Ivan repeated him in a murmur, and Alfred thought he heard the click of an old rusty timer. "Be nice. We're all here to have a good time."

"I am always nice." To disguise his excitement, Ivan dipped a hand beneath his jacket. “May I?” 

“Smoke?” Alfred said with surprise, staring at the long paper pack in Ivan’s hand. “I can’t remember the last time you smoked, dude.” He wrapped his arms around himself. “Out here is fine, just not in the house.”

He shook a cigarette from the pack, and Alfred laughed. Ivan glanced at him, searching his pockets for a match to ignite. He pulled the matchbox from his slacks and shook it open.

“Longs.” Alfred unhurriedly drew his Zippo from the pocket of his slacks. “I almost forgot you empires are all the same.”

The lighter opened between them with a metallic click. Alfred lifted an eyebrow, the beginnings of a grin on his pale mouth. 

He gestured at the darkness around them. “Come on. Nobody out here but you and me, dude.”

Ivan stared down at him with an unreadable expression, and the match he held flickered into cold death. The wind died, and the lighter’s yellow flame brightened. 

Then Ivan bowed to dip his Sobranie in the yellow flame, and spoke around the cigarette: “Spasibo.”


	2. Sobranie 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "But with a lead, I'm amazing."

The end of the cigarette glowed cherry red. Alfred watched the crimson reflection in Ivan’s violet eyes. Smiling, he flipped the lighter closed and pocketed it. “Zippo. Classy as hell.” 

Alfred slid the paper box across the railing to investigate and lifted a cigarette from the pack. He glanced at the glittering gold filter and met Ivan’s eyes with a sardonic expression and an eyebrow. “I need to start taking bets.” 

His heart twisted, helpless in the light of that blue gaze. His sunflower had asked to see him, Ivan thought, finally invited him to join famous American holiday party. He welcomed Ivan's arrival and offered to light his cigarette-- a merry sight indeed. 

And to think, he had feared Alfred might have changed his mind, might have turned him away at the door. He should not have snuck into the party. He should have forced the world to watch as Alfred greeted him with welcome. 

He had not made the grievous mistakes his subconscious threatened when he tried to sleep. Alfred had been unintentionally cruel. The world, Ivan thought on a deep inhale of tobacco, was warmer just for being near him. How strange that Manhattan itself was cold. 

“Wasteful.” Ivan exhaled a cloud of smoke. “The plastic is unusable after the tank is emptied. Do not take bets. You are not mature enough to lose with grace.”

Alfred lifted the cigarette to his nose, scoffed. The tobacco smelled both spiced and sweet. “And matches aren’t? And for all you know, I play a mean round of poker.”

“Until the first wave of conflict.” Ivan reclined on the railing. “Matches can be burned.” 

Alfred laid an elbow on the metal, grinning with the pack in his hand. “You can refill some Zippos. I can keep my shit together long enough to win a—card game.”

“I would be shocked.” Ivan tapped his ashes right onto the city below, spread his other fingers. “Why rely on butane?”

Alfred crossed his ankles with a flourish. “No, you wouldn’t. Why keep the old when the new works better?” 

He slipped the cigarette back into the pack. “Aesthetic is no reason to decline progress. People love this stuff. A dollar a pop and boom, you’re a millionaire.” 

“The two on the left are poison.” Ivan said absently, watching him. “Likewise, progress is not an excuse to privatize any one product for distribution or an excuse to over-charge for a product by adding pointless modifications.” He took a long drag. “Matches do what they are intended, and they are cheap and simple to make. Without the original invention your innovation is useless anyway. It is an industrial novelty.” 

“Some of us can afford novelty here and there.”

“So your states build luxury housing to convince their father to visit?”

“Hey, I worked my fingers to the bone for a hundred years. I deserve nice things.” Alfred set a hip against the railing and shook the pack noisily. “How about your expensive-ass stokes? How are these not a luxury?”

Ivan glanced at his vice. “Less than a penthouse.”

Alfred tilted his chin. He set the pack thoughtfully on the railing. “Soviet Union didn’t smoke.”

Ivan met his eyes. He looked away. He said nothing. 

Alfred played with his glass. “You can’t avoid everybody all night, you know. I have to go in and make an announcement soon.” 

Ivan lifted his half-finished cigarette, and Alfred nodded. 

A pair of cold hands landed on his lower back, and Alfred shrieked in shock. “Jesus Christ!”

He whirled. His elbow struck the martini glass he’d balanced on the rail. Cold water soaked the back of his shirt. 

His brother glared at him. 

“Mattie!” Alfred clutched himself and shivered violently, glancing after the cocktail he’d knocked into the city below. “What the hell! Where did you come from?” 

“I’ve been here.” Canada snapped. “I’ve been trying to get your attention. Papa says it’s time to come inside and make the toast.”

“Jesus.” Alfred scrubbed his back, trying to warm himself. “Fine, you psycho. I’ll be in.”

Canada rolled his eyes and made to turn, but Alfred stopped him. “Wait, hold on.”

He gestured between them. “Have you and Russia officially met?”

Russia turned with an eyebrow lifted, cigarette smoking between his teeth. 

Alfred nudged his brother conspiratorially. “Did you know he’s one of the guys who sees you?”

Matthew met his eyes, surprised. He looked up at Ivan—they were nearly the same height, Alfred noticed with distaste—and said, “Really? You can see me?”

“I have always thought it strange the others are so brash around you, Mister Canada.” Russia spoke around the cigarette and plucked it from his mouth with two fingers to ash it on the snowy railing. “Maybe you and I are enough alike. It is a pleasure.”

They shook. Alfred watched with jealousy. 

When Matthew closed the door, he turned back to Russia with a finger lifted and a mouthful of threats. “Do I need to say anything? Do you remember that I will rip you in half if you even look at him sideways?”

“I remember Sochi.” Russia flicked the end of his cigarette abruptly onto the heads of the city below. “Have I not been trustworthy with your brother? I tire with your threats.” 

Alfred adjusted his sleeves sharply. “Then it’s not news to you.”

Ivan turned to face Alfred directly. How was he expected to maintain decorum when Alfred blatantly ignored the monumental effort Ivan had given to soothe his obnoxious paranoia? He had a job to do, and Alfred's attitude prevented him from reaching his goals. 

He lowered his head. Alfred responded so well to being ignored. He needed to push the boy. 

Russia leaned in close, too close, and Alfred lifted his shoulders, bared his teeth. Ivan’s hair brushed his forehead. Alfred’s fingers itched to curl into fists. 

“You know,” Russia murmured with those horrible intense eyes trained on him, “I would imagine you might be more trusting, Fredka. After our last enounter.” 

The thought of a fight was awful, and Alfred hesitated with the realization. He didn’t want to fight with Russia, not tonight. Alfred clenched his jaw. "I'm not talking about that."

"Obviously." Ivan passed Alfred rudely without waiting for a response and opened the door, releasing a wave of heated air. 

“I am deeply injured, Mister Jones.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I see you have decided to forget. Next time I will not waste my time.”

Before the door closed—dangerously close to someone who might hear—Ivan muttered, “Moi podsolnukh.”

Alfred watched the frosted door close and hated that his face was hot. 

To the empty balcony, he said, “I didn’t mean it like that.”

The air was frigid. Alfred pressed his fingernails into the pads of his palms, frustrated and guilty. Russia had no right, he thought, no right to throw that back in his face. He was still processing, God damn it. He wasn’t ready. 

He scrubbed his hands on his pants, scowling to himself. He’d cooperated, hadn’t he? He’d let Ivan—he’d let him win. He could have broken his nose, but no: Alfred had been a willing participant in their game. He’d sat with him in the kitchen and eaten with him, he’d played video games after like nothing had changed. Why did anything have to change? 

What on earth could Russia expect from him? No, Alfred thought. To bring that night up when he just wanted to party wasn’t at all fair. But then, they had never been merciful. Even when they could afford a little generosity. 

Japan knocked on the window, startling him from his thoughts, and waved him inside. Alfred swallowed down his guilt, put on a happy face, and followed Russia into the apartment. 

Francis waved from the crowded salon. Alfred forced himself to look stupid, forced Russia from his mind. 

Alfred stepped onto the salon table and cast his eye over the crowd: Germany and Italy, clinging by the wall; Prussia and Spain, who wrapped their arms around one another with drinks in hand; Switzerland and Lichtenstein standing close enough to touch. The Nordic countries dispersed by the window, where Sweden gazed up at him with that blank expression and with Finland on his arm. Estonia held the terrace door open for Latvia, who dripped on the floor and beamed. 

England crossed his legs on the couch, and Francis stood beside him with a kindly smile. Matthew cocked his head from the armchair on his left, and Austria played a cadence to the end of a sad song. 

Bell peals sounded from the side of Francis’ flute, and the assembled nations fell into expectant silence. Alfred opened his hands for their attention, willing his stomach to settle. 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “thank you all for joining me here tonight. For those of you who have never been to one of my holiday parties: welcome. On the agenda we have dancing, food, drinks till we drop. Ball drops at midnight. If you have gifts for anyone, give ‘em anytime. Bar’s open till close and I have guest rooms downstairs for anybody who knows Francis. If anybody has any questions, just stop me anytime.”

Francis giggled, and Prussia whooped. 

Alfred grinned. “We have a special celebration in order this evening. First and foremost, tonight is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first inclusive holiday party here in Manhattan. Let’s have a round of applause for that.”

Poland cheered over the polite clapping. 

“Second,” Alfred said with a wink, “tonight also marks the very first time I have had the opportunity to share my holiday not just with my former allies.” He nodded to his family. “Tonight I am blessed and delighted to ring out the Christmas holiday and ring in the new year with the entirety of NATO and the United Nations, as well as a few other welcome friends. This is the best party we've had yet. Let’s have another round of applause for that, yeah?”

The sounds of whooping echoed from the ceiling. Ukraine bounced up and down from her place by the dining room table, and Alfred made a mental note to steer her clear of Russia. He wasn’t sure she knew Russia was in attendance. He kicked himself for his mistake. 

“I think,” Alfred said with a smile when the merriment fell quiet, “I think that the theme of this year’s holiday party should be camaradery. Let’s prepare a toast.”

Fine flutes and thick glasses of lager glinted in the light. 

Alfred nodded his head at Germany and Italy. “A toast to sportsmanship, to nobility, and fame. To our brothers and sisters, and to standing together.”

Germany’s mouth curved into a rare smile. Prussia lifted his glass to his old friend, and Francis bowed his head with respect. 

Alfred turned around to nod at Hungary beside the piano. “To courage and strength, and to protecting those we love the most.” To Austria, he added, “To the sacred arts, and to our responsibility to uphold our cultures though them, no matter how times may change or stay the same.” 

Austria inclined his head, and Hungry nodded proudly.

Alfred bowed to China in the theater doorway. “To the age which brings us wisdom, to change, and to the hope that our teaching may lead the way for our children to make a better world.” 

China lifted his chin. Hong Kong and Korea clapped politely behind him. 

To Japan. “To pride, and to creating in ourselves the best men—and women—we can be.” 

Japan glanced at China, who smiled over his shoulder. He bowed deeply. 

To Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, Alfred said, “To the families and friends who never leave us.” 

Denmark swallowed gruffly, raised his glass.

Alfred shifted to toast Spain, who blew Francis a kiss. “To the days after glory, that we sleep and eat and love with as much vigor as we once worked. May we accept the coming year with grace.”

Francis caught his eye. Alfred gestured for him to speak.

Francis reached for Matthew, who set his bear on the floor to reach for his father’s hand. “To our little ones, to our dreams that they are strong and wise and kind. With every sacrifice, our love will grow. For every day we show them love, we receive two days in heaven.”

He smoothed his fingers along Matthew’s cheek. “To the ones who will always live in our hearts. For those who slept soundly in our arms and have outgrown us. For the children who will always be our children, who become our sisters and brothers in arms, and who are friends in times of peace.”

Francis gestured to Arthur. 

Arthur coughed into his fist, stood, and cleared his throat awkwardly. “Yes. And as well for those who are no longer with us. For honor, for dignity, and for pride. Most of all,” he said thickly, “for each of us to share these things with one another when we can, because life is not easy, nor is it kind. But, we are all still here, and we are all stronger for it.”

“Well said.” Alfred nodded, and Arthur returned to his seat. “And last but not least, here’s to the old friends who find their way home.”

He gestured to Russia, who cocked his head with that stupid childlike expression. China led the short, stilted applause. 

Alfred raised both hands. “To comradery, and here’s to hoping we carry the theme through into the coming year. Cheers, y’all!”

Shouts of every language, raised glasses, and over the clinking Alfred heard Australia shout, “Cheers, mate!” 

Francis called over the din: “Look someone in the eye! Look someone in the eye or seven years’ bad sex!”

Alfred and Ivan were the only partygoers without a drink. Alfred thanked his lucky stars. 

 

-

 

Jazz crooned through the wall speakers, and Alfred turned the knob until England called that he could hear carols from the salon. The apartment was heady with alcohol and perfume. Jewelry glittered in the lights turned low. Empty glasses, full glasses, half-finished bottles and discarded black jackets littered every flat surface. Lazy and drunk, the crowd gathered to dance. 

Alfred returned to the salon to find Matthew leading Francis in a swaying two-step beside the wall of windows. Francis pillowed his head against Matthew’s shoulder and smiled to himself with his eyes closed and his slim fingers curled daintily over Matthew’s palm.

Francis wore a jeweled bracelet that glinted with the kaleidoscope echoes of Christmas lights. Alfred slipped his phone out of a back pocket and snapped three pictures, then another when Matthew made a face over his big brother’s head. 

Behind him, Prussia asked Hungary to dance, bowed in half at the waist, and was mischievously refused. Hungary told him she was too sober to be seen dancing with him.

Ukraine dragged her sister onto the floor, ruddy with drink and beaming so earnestly that even Natalia smirked. Her platinum hair, removed hastily some hour previous from its sophisticated twist, caught on the sequined bodice of her dress. 

Alfred stared heatedly at Russia from across the apartment until Ivan caught his glare and looked away.

Latvia and Moldova slept in a pile beneath the dining room table. Alfred noted with surprise that they were swathed warmly in Russia’s duster. 

Finland laughed in Sweden’s embrace, tilting his head in time to the beat. Sweden gazed over his glasses with obvious adoration. Alfred felt a warmth in his chest that smiled. 

Prussia presented Hungary with a drink and again requested a dance. Hungary told him she was dressed too plainly to dance, and took a sip. 

Alfred tapped Francis on the shoulder. “May I steal him from you, monsieur?”

Francis pressed a kiss to his cheek, then to Matthew’s nose. He floated away to the wine room, tittering at his other guests, and Alfred made a mental note to keep an eye on his clothing in case the silken ensemble disappeared during the night.

Matthew lifted his arm. 

Alfred landed in his embrace. 

He mimicked his brother’s polite half-bow. Matthew’s hands were cold—always cold—but he smiled. His eyes were too light, Alfred thought, not quite the right shade of purple. 

His stomach fluttered. Canada smelled like leather and snow. 

Matthew swept him up, and Alfred felt more than one pair of eyes trained at his back. After a verse, Matthew said, “You’re shit without a lead.”

Alfred spun on light feet, and Matthew dipped him. 

Reclined in his brother’s grip, Alfred wiggled his eyebrows. “Yeah, but with a lead I’m amazing.”

Matthew carried him into the next song without bothering to ask for a second dance. 

“So,” he said after a verse, “I saw Russia come back in. Are you two still good, then?”

Alfred frowned. His stomach tightened. “What do you mean?”

Matthew lifted a brow. “Well, I know you kinda left him out to dry. So are you two good now? Did he say anything about it? You know.” He added. “All that time you didn’t talk to him after you almost broke up with him.”

Prussia tucked a red poinsettia bud into Hungary’s braid. Hungary handed him her empty glass and told him she was too young to dance. 

Alfred sucked on his tongue. “You know damn well we’re not like that.”

Poland staggered out of the wine room with a bottle and one swinging earring. Lithuania followed with the other, dodging Poland’s drunken flapping as he tried to return the pearl. 

Matthew sighed. “You didn’t apologize, did you? Are you allergic to acting like an adult?”

Alfred pressed his lips together. He didn’t want to think about Russia while Mattie’s cold hands were on his waist. 

Alfred caught a glimpse of England tapping his fingers on the dining room table and wondered if his father deliberately guarded the little sleeping nations at his feet. What a mother hen. 

Alfred laughed, and Matthew tightened the fingers on his side. His brother was too lean, and not quite tall enough. But he was old and comfortable and safe. Good for his blood pressure. 

“I was worried.” Matthew gazed down at him through his glasses. “But you pulled it off.”

“Ye of little faith.” Alfred spoke with more confidence than he’d felt the day before and laid his cheek on his brother’s shoulder. “I told you people just wanna party.”

Matthew pressed his chin into the crown of his head and swayed with the vocalizations on the speakers. “Even Austria stayed for a while. Did you see that?”

“I saw Seborga.”

Matthew lifted his head. “Damn it, really?”

Alfred nodded with his tongue between his teeth. “They got him outta here quick, but he came in with Antonio and Romano.” 

The carol faded into conversation. 

“Damn it.” Matthew frowned as they parted, fingers intertwined. “Okay, you win. I’ll send the stuff when I get home.”

Alfred bowed low with a straight English back. “Shouldn’t bet with me.”

Matthew bowed with a flourish. “One of these days you’ll learn how to bluff.” 

Several nations clapped as the dancers waited for the next song. 

Prussia asked Hungary to the floor. Hungary told him she was barely old enough, and took his hand. 

Russia stood alone in the corner. Alfred turned away.

Matthew shook his head, ignored, and spoke to himself. "What a jerk."


	3. Whiskey Cures All Ills

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something about the way Ivan stood unnerved him, Alfred thought, set that horrible anxiety hammering through his veins. Maybe it was the confident broadening of the shoulders, or the noble tilt of his chin. Or the fact that he knew Russia wanted to knock his block off for being such a jerk. The walk across the room felt like a death march.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that as of 1\1\2018, this story was edited with the correct edit. This chapter was the one to change the most. It's better, definitely give it another read,
> 
> Thank you!
> 
> Chels

Snow drifted solemnly past the terrace windows. The first hours of the new year were crisp and quiet. Empty glasses and napkins coated in crumbs littered the pool table, the salon, the dining room table. The theater and kitchen were dark and empty. The crowd on the streets below rallied with excitement that echoed up the steel walls of the skyscraper to the penthouse. Inside, heat and the scent of baked desserts were heavy on the air. 

Alfred laughed, chased from the salon by good-natured accusations. “I hear you! I’ll turn on a waltz, geez.” 

He knocked the iPod from its dock with clumsy fingers, realizing with a start than he was drunker than he thought he had been. 

He bent his knees cautiously to retrieve the player, holding himself steady with a palm pressed to the wall where the tree had stood. He pushed half a splintered cue stick out of the way. “You know, you geezers ought to learn something new. It’s good for the brain.”

Soft horns and a chorus of strings played from the speakers. 

Alfred silenced the anxious twist in his stomach when he rounded the doorway and found not one, but every old empire waiting impatiently with arms crossed. 

Prussia leapt forward with Spain in tow. Germany led Hungary to dance beside them. 

Francis smiled, indulgent and rosy, and Alfred backed into the theater arch to lean on the wall and cross his ankles. He rolled his wrist in a lazy gesture, cast his eyes to the ceiling. “Nobody waltzes anymore. We’ve got all year, though, so I guess I can humor you old-timers.”

England snapped that he’d dance the tango with the devil before he danced with Francis and landed with a red-faced huff on the couch. Alfred estimated one more whiskey before he’d be drunk enough to have fun, and reached behind the bar blindly. 

Spurned by England, Francis batted his eyelashes at Russia. 

Alfred watched with disbelief and filled a glass as he walked. “Here.” 

Arthur glanced up at him. Little green strings above his head frosted his hair with emerald light. “What.”

Alfred pointed at the amber tumbler he’d set on the table without removing his his gaze from Francis, who gestured a flustered Ivan forward with a hand. As he watched, Ivan ducked into his scarf, shook his head bashfully. “Whiskey. Cures all ills.”

“Can’t hurt.” Arthur downed the glass, and Alfred produced the bottle he’d stolen from the bar. “Ah, there’s a good lad. Pour me a double.” 

Ivan lowered his scarf, pale cheeks blushed.

Arthur followed his gaze. He gestured with the glass. “Russia and Francis, hm? Been a time since I’ve seen those two on the floor.”

Alfred fell into the armchair beside the couch and rubbed his hands over his slacks hard enough to generate heat. The dancers parted as Russia approached his big brother, towering. “Huh. I didn’t think they liked each other much.” 

“Well, day to day.” Arthur lounged with the whiskey in hand, tapped one immaculate loafer in the air. “But back in the day those two idiots debuted every ball. Quite the spectacle. You know, Francis helped raise that thing.”

Ivan reached out, and Francis took his hand without hesitation. The floor cleared, and Alfred reminded himself that Russia probably spoke French, and that was something useful to remember. “Francis is older than dirt.”

Arthur barked a laugh into his glass. “That he is, lad, that he is. Make sure you tell him that for me, would you?” 

Alfred watched with no small reservations as Francis reached up to pat Ivan’s lapel. Ivan lowered his snowy head so Francis could peck him on the cheek and whisper in his ear. 

“I never like it when Francis gets all whispery,” he said. 

Arthur glanced at him, lowered his whiskey. “Smart boy.”

The other nations stood along the walls, chattering enthusiastically. Ivan had straightened his back, Alfred thought, and in the process had grown another foot taller and a thousand years older. The effect was distinctly intimidating. 

Francis looked so small. His big brother—everyone’s big brother—floated in a taffeta cloud into Ivan’s arms, and Alfred muttered, “Watch the hands.” 

England stared with him. The waltz began, a melody of flutes and horns.

Francis lifted a pointed toe, and Ivan turned him like a music box ballerina, deliberate and practiced and ornate. 

Alfred forgot his suspicions. He was breathless when Ivan lifted Francis, glittering and silk, to the rise of the horns; he was spinning when Ivan twirled Francis in his arms again and again and again, the echoes of skillful perfection in every rotation. 

Francis was carefree, smiling, eyebrows knotted and buoyant and so graceful that for a moment, Alfred thought his big brother was made of the opalescent curve of a pearl and the color of foam, the taste of cream. 

The two twirled to the side, and Francis caught his gawking. He murmured to Ivan, a smirk on his lips, and Ivan flashed a violet glance over his shoulder. Alfred thought he was smiling. 

The music swelled into crescendo, and Francis stepped alongside Ivan’s black shoes in a rapid duet. 

Ankles crossed, they tilted as if the world’s rotation would follow—and Ivan caught them both, carried them across the room in three sweeping steps. 

Ivan was balanced on the balls of his feet, and their eyes were locked, and they were human, so human. 

The song ended in a triumph of brass and strings, and Ivan twirled Francis beneath his arm one, two, three times. 

They finished with a bow and a curtsy and to riotous applause from the rest of the room. 

Alfred clapped loudly. He thought that they’d all forgotten who they were before they came. He could feel the pain of reality in his chest, in his throat. “Wow.”

England tapped the side of his glass with the silver ring on his left hand and frowned at Francis kissing Russia. “Always have been.” 

Francis pecked Ivan on one cheek, then the other. He beamed. Alfred thought he felt tall and clumsy, and pressed his heels more firmly into the floor. “You’d think they were somebody else.” 

“What do you think these parties used to be for?” England stared into his glass. “To forget, for a while.”

He took a shot, and Alfred made a face at him. “Boy, that’s heavy. Thanks for that.”

“It can’t all be fun and games, lad.” England sighed. “You’ve done a good thing here. Be proud of the atmosphere. Not that you have any trouble with pride.”

Alfred barely heard the praise, nodded absently. Francis still held Ivan’s hand. Russia accepted the crowd's attention with noble ease, comfortable with France on his arm, and Alfred realized he was jealous. Jealous, he was certain, because he deserved the attention Francis received from-- the crowd. If only he was half as graceful. 

“Yeah.” Alfred said quietly, watching the way Ivan smiled at Gilbert. “Thanks.”

Arthur gave him a strange look. "What's with you?"

The crowd began calling his name, and Alfred was spared an answer. 

“It’s your turn!” Feliciano’s eyes shined, wet with drunken and fervent tears, and he bounced on Germany’s arm. “The host has to dance!”

Everyone was staring at him. 

Alfred turned to England, who nodded once and downed the rest of his whiskey. 

Alfred’s gut knotted painfully. “I don't waltz.”

Francis released Russia’s hand, and Ivan sent Alfred a disapproving look over his head. 

Francis waved at him to join them, blushed with drink and exertion. “Don't be rude, mon petite, this is traditional. Up!”

His heart pounded in dread. “I—your traditions suck.” Alfred said in lieu of a real response. He shrugged, grinned like a charmer. “Come on, you guys want me to follow that up? No way.”

“Perhaps,” Ludwig raised his voice over the clamor, “we are making Mister America uncomfortable. If he isn’t confident in his abilities,” he said as he stared Alfred directly in the eye, “we cannot force him.” 

The room fell abruptly silent. Gilbert laughed outright. Spain pressed his fingers to his chin, watched with amusement.

Arthur lifted both eyebrows and poured himself a fourth shot. “Are you going to take that?”

Alfred glared at him as the glass filled to the brim. “You hate showboating.” 

“Yeah, but you’ve been challenged.” Arthur said plainly, and set the bottle on the table with a finite click. “Go be a man. It’s a dance, not the summit. Go on, then.”

Gilbert led the crowd in chanting his nickname, and Alfred tried to breathe past the vice around his lungs. It was just a dance, he thought, he knew how to waltz. Arthur taught him ages ago. He still knew how to waltz.

It was just a dance. Alfred forced a laugh and rose, lifted both hands placatingly. “Okay, okay, I’ll give it a shot.”

There were eyes on him; but worse, there were smirks and leers from the back of the room. The crowd applauded as he rounded the salon to meet Russia on the floor, and Alfred said, “This’ll be the best you guys have ever seen.” 

Something about the way Ivan stood unnerved him, Alfred thought, set that horrible anxiety hammering through his veins. Maybe it was the confident broadening of the shoulders, or the blueblood tilt of his chin. 

Or the fact that he knew Russia wanted to knock his block off for being such a jerk. The walk across the room felt like a death march; the eyes of the world felt like judgement. 

Alfred's square jaw was set. His stare was unremorseful. The boy twisted the material of his sleeve between two fingers as he approached, just invisible to the crowd which demanded his acquiescence. He was painfully handsome, Ivan thought, and deliciously anxious. His irresistible boy, who had been certain in his guilt to invite him. 

Ivan tapped his temple, then held out his hand. 

Alfred glared. Right here, he thought in rising panic, and narrowed his eyes. Right in front of all these people.

Ivan lifted his eyebrows, victorious, and Alfred wanted nothing more in the world than to break his nose. “Are you worried? I should think otherwise. Fedya.” 

Alfred ground his teeth. Ivan hadn't bothered to lower his voice, incorrigible to the world that watched. Shameless. Maddening. His stomach rolled, threateningly. “What if I was?”

Ivan spoke slowly and clearly, with a patience Alfred had learned to expect from his aged counterpart. “Then I have wasted my time.”

Germany’s brow was furrowed as he listened. Alfred caught his eye and scowled. 

He remembered the table in the living room, Texas folded parallel to the wood. They would probably be all right, he reasoned. Ivan wasn’t furious, just annoyed. And people were whispering about the tension, the pause before the dance. 

Alfred glared as hard as he could. But he removed his glasses, folded them tenderly, and laid them lens-side-up in Ivan’s palm. 

All whispering stopped. Alfred could feel Arthur’s eyes on the back of his head, Germany’s steel gaze. He could practically see Prussia's curious eyebrow, and fought the urge to lower his eyes from Ivan's intensity. 

Ivan was close; very, very close. His exhalation ruffled the hair on the crown of Alfred’s head, and Alfred stubbornly refused to look away. 

Ivan tilted his head to the side so that his pale hair fell into his eyes. “You and I have played in Moscow twice now, Alfred. Which night shall you relive?”

Alfred felt a shiver roll down his spine and refused to allow his trepidation to show. He thought of the balcony, of Ivan's icy anger. “I didn’t mean it like that.” 

Ivan lifted his arm. Alfred laid his elbow on Ivan's bicep and his fingers in Ivan’s open palm. His skin was cold, exactly as cold as it should have been. Alfred was surprised his breath didn't fog in the warmth of the house. 

“I do not care what you mean. I care what you said.” Ivan told him, stern. “I am annoyed with you, boy.”

He met Ivan’s anger with an expression that felt entirely too honest for the crowded room. He wished he had his glasses. He wasn't as young as he used to be, and some of the gathered nations knew his tricks, knew what his glasses had come to represent. He wanted them, to hide behind the lenses. 

Alfred tilted his chin, a short nod. He hadn’t even seen where Ivan had hidden them. “Yeah. I know.”

Ivan leaned in close enough to brush Alfred’s nose with his snowy hair. “Good boys apologize.” 

The air between them was electric, the air around them pregnant with held breaths and sharp old eyes. Alfred’s heart hammered, and he thought that his stomach might just purge if he couldn’t control his anxiety. “Russia, that’s so unfair.”

“You must be joking.” Ivan lowered his head that final inch, laid his nose on Alfred's. "You have always known better." 

Alfred realized half a second too late that he'd flicked his gaze to Ivan's lips. He decided with exasperation that he hated himself. "I guess so."

He wasn't sure what Ivan referenced, but in his own mind Alfred recalled the day they'd met, and wished he could warn himself of the intensity to come. Ivan wouldn’t have touched him before, Alfred knew, because the hunger that had grown between them, the delicious suspense, had not existed before the Cold War. So much had changed, Alfred thought; the rivalry between their people had forced them both to grow. 

That rivalry had been the source of Alfred’s growth, and Ivan knew how much he'd changed. He’d told Alfred the morning after, when he had settled Alfred's hands over the headboard and told him to sing. 

To his credit, Alfred thought as Ivan disdainfully lifted his head, Russia had played his part well. He’d admitted that he was jealous, not angry, and that he admired Alfred in his own way. And sure, he’d confessed awful things, but he’d wrapped the confessions in compliments and caresses and gentleness like Alfred had never known, as if to apologize without making promises neither was ready to keep. 

Life was complicated, he thought sadly, and wished again that he could go back, all the way back. Maybe for a while, even the smallest apology could mean enough. 

He couldn’t meet Ivan’s eyes or his anger. Alfred muttered. “I’m sorry, okay? I didn’t mean it. I was a jerk.” 

Ivan laid his palm on the curve of his back, too far around his waist to be polite and too decisively to be strangers. The room would know by the way Ivan’s fingers brushed his hip, Alfred thought. The room would know.

He gave Ivan an irritated look, lips pressed tightly together, and Ivan lifted his eyebrows and dared him to say otherwise. 

Alfred lowered his glare. So, he thought, that nebulous something that they had discussed between their first soft touches remained. That wall he’d broken during his last trip to Moscow remained in pieces on the floor in Ivan’s living room, a monument to what was coming. Ivan pushed the boundaries of friendship-- or whatever it was that crackled between them-- and waited for Alfred to respond. 

So, Alfred thought. Deadly, deadly games. 

It should have been a difficult decision; or maybe it never was, and he’d just complicated the issue because he was afraid of what his family would think. In reality, Alfred realized, their options for the evening were very simple: either they made a point to tell the world Russia and America were united again as companions, or they kept the rumors. Francis liked to gossip. They could have gotten away with lies.

But that wasn’t very heroic, was it. “It’s our fault.”

Gunpowder, Ivan thought, hiding his expression in the curve of Alfred’s throat. Brittle grass, wheat, sand. A flash of erotic memory and a glimpse of Francis through his hair, pressing a hand to his chin in dark thought. “What is our fault?”

“Vietnam.” No one could see his face through Ivan’s bulk, and Alfred was grateful. He turned his head into Ivan's lapel, counted their shared sins. “Afghanistan. Korea. We hurt everybody. Don’t you ever think about it?”

Poor decent little thing. Ivan did not—would not—understand Alfred’s obsession with the moral compass. He had no desire to try. His understanding of morality was that of a tool used to manipulate the heart into grief and guilt, and the mind into a brittle cog. Much like religion, he thought, controlled the human masses milling outside. He didn’t understand. He was not made to understand. 

But Alfred loved his morality, chose to err on the side of decency at every available avenue, justified his every action with the cry of valor he carried in his veins like blood. What was completely unfathomable to Ivan was a structure Alfred needed to be Alfred. Morality was central to his personality. 

He would have to wait for Alfred to decide that morality was not going to save him, that he was perfect without the valor or the remorse or the self-contempt. He would wait. He would patiently wait a little longer for the future. For Alfred.

“I see why you have not spoken with your family.” It came quietly then, almost as if Ivan hadn’t realized he’d spoken, and Alfred lowered his eyes. “I am sorry you are in pain. I cannot understand, but I am glad you are here, where you are safe.” 

Alfred was afraid that if he found Ivan’s eyes through his watery haze, he would see something there he didn’t want to see, something that wasn’t an almost-truth or a not-promise. He wasn’t ready. He wasn't ready for a lot of the things he was about to admit. At least he didn't have to speak them. 

Alfred nodded, hiding his face. He adjusted his grip more tightly on Ivan’s shoulder to indicate that he was ready to dance. Ivan inhaled deeply one more time, rose. 

They straightened. The room was still as a tomb. Alfred’s eyes were dry, and Ivan’s expression was blank. Alfred lengthened his back, tried to remember anything about waltzing that Arthur had taught him.

He made a wry expression at Ivan, and Ivan nodded. He tightened his grip.

The music returned, and instead of horns Alfred heard the sweet notes of a piano, the hum of a cello. He wondered if the music selection had been intended to keep the vibrating superpowers calm in a moment of tension. 

Their first steps were out of time, stilted. Clean, but flawed. Their eyes met, calculating and counting. 

Alfred thought it felt like a fight and knew, now, that they could do better. Moscow in the Cold War, he thought; Moscow and Everything After. 

Ivan smoothed his fingers along Alfred’s side, curled a finger in his belt and pulled. 

Alfred allowed Ivan to spin him slowly on the polished floor, reserved in Ivan’s careful hands. 

Ivan tapped a finger on Alfred’s side, and Alfred followed his subtle direction to perfection. His bright eyes were open; his mouth was hard in thought. 

Ivan had been delighted to learn within a decade of meeting that Arthur had raised his son to crave direction. He wasn’t surprised—no one would be—that Alfred had been trained to seek affection like a pup to a bone. It was his father’s manipulative and taciturn education that created Alfred’s characteristic duality: the boy possessed both a desperate need for freedom of choice and a desperate need for affirmation, and was cursed to seek one at the expense of the other. 

Why else would he have bothered with young America, if the boy couldn’t be trained? He had arrived at Alfred’s door first for a reason. Alfred was obstinate, but he trusted Ivan—he had been quick to ensure it while the boy was new and impressionable—and allowed himself to be culled in Russia’s cold hands, and in his hands only. Alfred was a very strong young nation in many ways—in every way—and had denied himself the affection he so craved in his search for power. Which, Ivan supposed, meant that Alfred knew about that particular flaw.

Alfred moved with quick-footed poise, a refinement learned in less gentle climes. He watched Ivan’s face, but stared at some memory far away from the safety of Manhattan. 

No living thing could survive long without support, least of all the gentle, compassionate, sociable Alfred. Arthur created in his son a perfect storm, and Ivan knew the time would come when the winds would rise. Like the wolf slavering at the butcher’s door, Ivan had waited for the moment when Alfred cracked from the pressure of eagerly shouldering the world too young, and too alone. Alfred was a child nation in an empire’s body, an unsustainable learning curve, a cheerful maw. 

But he had learned to expect that Alfred would surprise him. No civil war had ever ended a worthy nation, and no nation had become without at least one uprising. America’s own civil war came and went, and his family deserted him. Ivan had been disgusted by their behavior, and had stood plainly by Alfred’s side. He had been the only nation to witness firsthand the desperation with which Alfred fought for his own life, and had been fascinated with his bare-toothed savagery. 

World War One scared the boy, but Alfred held strong and frankly worried them all with his predacious attitude. Ivan, who had been privy to the boy’s startling barbarity during his civil war, had been delighted by the expressions on his allies’ faces when they met Alfred’s taste for blood. Sadly, not long after, Ivan had been forced home to deal with the revolution and had been unable to enjoy more of Alfred’s antics. When he returned after the revolution, Alfred’s quirks had been less appetizing. 

World War Two only strengthened the boy’s resolve and redefined his vision, whet what would become a ravenous appetite for globalization. Ivan remembered hushed words in a back room, how he had sneered at their fear. What else could they expect, when they were the ones who taught Alfred to kill or be killed, that he would be abandoned by all but his own power in times of need? They left the boy alone for a century with nothing to do but eat and grow fat with power, had humored him with names like ‘cit on the hill’, and had not thought that his enterprise and ego might run unchecked? 

No, Ivan thought, he had seen the beginnings of what America had become, and was yet to become. He was also guilty of spoiling the overconfident little thing.

Ivan led with his right hip, lifted his foot just a moment too long, and Alfred’s eyes landed inquisitively on him. Ivan tilted his head to the right, shifted to the blade of his foot; Alfred pressed his weight into their next turn, and they managed some grace. 

Alfred carried the ideals of bright-eyed youth, the hopes of a happy and beautiful world, but possessed the power and the hunger of war-mongering, guiltless, shameless empires past. If he wanted to survive, to eat and grow, Alfred would taste blood again and again. To the wholesome Alfred, such truths would be difficult to accept; but he was a clever youth, and had to have understood that his vision was nigh impossible. 

He had used his endless pursuit of Arthur’s affections—along with the friendship of the rest of the world—to distract himself, but that defensive umbrella had begun to fail, and Alfred was forced to face his identity. He had finally begun to ask himself the questions he’d distanced himself from asking. He would not assume that Alfred would quit his ideals so easily. The boy was so persistent, so doggedly stubborn. He was only very tired, and very lonely.

Perhaps, he thought as Alfred cocked his head in silent question, times changed less than they stayed the same. Perhaps it was not the world that changed, but they themselves. 

They turned, and the watch on Alfred's wrist caught the light. The boy belonged in half-light, Ivan thought, or in the first sunny moments of the fresh morning. The lights from the balcony set his golden fingers to glowing in a startling contrast to his own pale hand. They both wore black, but Alfred wore black better, leaner, more fashionably.

He was all luxury, Ivan thought jealously, a nation of excess and dishonest priorities and flat white teeth and bold blue eyes. 

Alfred searched Ivan’s posture, his face. Arthur had taught him how to dance. He had insisted in that stuffy parlor with the ugly red rug that all young gentlemen had always known how to dance. Dance was the language spoken by every nation, he’d told Alfred as he practiced the steps one by one, and he would need to speak fluently someday. 

He doubted Arthur had intended for this evening to be his paramount speech. He was not fluent in dance, Alfred thought, despite all of Arthur’s frustrated efforts. He spoke a dialect: not the language of the waltz, but the fluent dialect that was the shifting of Ivan's weight from heel to toe, the pressure of his thumb on Alfred’s hip when Alfred foolishly tensed his shoulders. The promise behind his patient expression. The memory behind the promise. 

Ivan’s lips were rough and cool on the curve of his ear. “You are a work of art, Alfred.” 

Alfred’s stomach clenched. Ivan’s finger moved on his belt, and Alfred leaned his weight to the right without restraint. 

Ivan twirled them in one, two, three, four, five lithe steps like marionettes on oiled strings. 

What happened, Alfred thought, to the wild terror he used to feel when he was alone with Ivan in a room? All he could remember were gentle touches and the promise to release him if he asked. Bright blue skies and all the time in the exciting new world. Kisses that tasted like everything they remembered but knew not to say. Moscow ruined him, he thought. Ivan ruined him, the clever bastard. 

They weren’t friends—not anymore, not yet. He’d seen the worst in Russia, and it was ugly—but he’d learned that he could be ugly too, and it wasn’t right to blame Ivan for every little thing his government had done. Alfred, like the rest of them, could only follow the rush of human development, and play his part to influence one event at a time. 

He had been naïve as a child nation, but he wasn’t an idiot. Peace never lasted forever. He and Ivan could not allow themselves to believe that anything would change, that they could be friends. He couldn’t allow himself to fall prey to his hopeful little imagination. 

But if he opened his eyes, he could catch the glimmer of white lights and the shine of the polished floor, the city below the windows. The room was quiet around the music, and he was a little warm and a little tipsy, and Ivan’s cold hands were a relief on his fingers, his wrist, his waist, his hip. He remembered how patient Ivan had been with his panic that night, how calmly he had accepted that Alfred was not in control of himself. 

A tug on his belt; Alfred tilted to the left. 

Ivan had promised to be gentle, and he had been. He had said, ‘I will treat you well,’ and called Alfred an angel. He had kept Alfred in that helpless place all night and into the morning, and Russia had stayed his merciless hand. They’d suspended reality for a while, just the two of them, and just by agreeing to play along with each other’s antics instead of fight. 

Shouldn’t they take advantage of their resolution while they had one? Ivan always knew what to do, he thought, and released a deep breath. 

On the upbeat, Alfred murmured for only Ivan to hear: “Be nice, okay?”

Not once had Ivan’s intense stare left his face. “If you agree to come back to me.” 

Alfred lifted both feet from the floor, rested his entire body on Ivan’s wide shoulder, reeled dizzily in a whirlwind of light and sound. 

He landed heavily, and Ivan balanced his ungainly misstep. Alfred whispered with his heart in his throat, “To Moscow?”

Ivan led him to the right. “After this. Come celebrate with me.”

Alfred shook his head, and the movement made him lightheaded. “You know I can’t. I have to meet with Mattie later this month for hockey.”

Ivan laid the bridge of his nose on Alfred’s as they glided across the floor, murmured in a voice that reminded him of twisted sheets and a room bleached white. “You would continue to hide yourself away from me?”

Alfred dragged alcohol-and sugar-scented air into his unwilling lungs. When he spoke, his voice was much softer than he wanted it to be. “Ivan. I’m not stupid.”

Alfred was not prepared for the next twirl, and Ivan took the opportunity to lift him bodily from the floor, forcing Alfred to kick outward to keep his balance.

Ivan's voice, Alfred thought when he landed breathlessly, sounded like a rockslide, and was only for him to hear. “But you are here, and I am here. What have I done to deserve such cruelty today?”

Murmured promises, a broad wet tongue, hiding behind his arms as those big hands slipped into his boxers. 

His knees felt weak. His face flushed. Alfred wrapped his fingers around a handful of Ivan’s black jacket, terrified that he would trip. He was drunk, and he was clumsy. “That’s not going to work.”

Ivan’s heart beat rapidly—or, more likely, at a reasonable pace. He could see the future in Alfred’s blushed cheeks, in the death-grip on his shoulder, in the boy's second misstep. Alfred had only to agree; Alfred wanted to agree. “Tell no one, if you think you are still hiding. Tell your brother if you are afraid. He knows. I see his face.”

Alfred found that breath couldn’t come fast enough. Something was coming down around them. Something that tasted like ice cream and coffee and maybe promises. “When does your plane leave?”

“It will leave when you are with me.”

Alfred laughed a little, and the room breathed a sigh. He found his footing. “You can’t strong-arm me, Braginsky.”

Ivan crushed him to the front of his body and pulled Alfred firmly upward to meet his expression of mocking. “I have no intention of such things.”

Oh God, they were playing. Ivan was playing with him, mischevious and devilish. Alfred could feel the grin on his face. “That won’t work either. How about you ask me real nice? You know,” he tilted his head with a smirk, “because we’re friends.”

Ivan chuckled. His expression softened, and the room watched. “For you, Mister Jones.” 

“Honored.” Alfred deliberately stepped on Ivan’s boot. “We'll talk about it."

The song ended, and he and Ivan were nose-to-nose and grinning. There was beat of silence. A beat to take a breath. A chance to take it back. 

“One more dance, Mister Jones.” Ivan said. “I fear I have wasted our first.”

“Why, Mister Braginsky.” Alfred leaned upward to meet him, and Ivan leaned down. “A guy might start to think you liked him."

The next song was upbeat, a chorus of violins. Alfred met Ivan’s eyes, saw there the mischievousness that was still raw and new and so much fun. 

He grinned. The room would know, he thought, by the way Alfred glanced down for just a second at Ivan’s bared teeth. “At your leisure, sir.” 

Francis, in Russia’s arms, had been cream and honey, sugar and pearls—Alfred thought that Russia turned him into crimson coals in the pot and the cherry red inhale at the end of a cigarette. 

It was only a dance, he thought. And it was the new year. He deserved to have some fun. 

It was only a dance. Ivan carried him where he pleased, twirled him as he pleased, lifted him from the floor as he pleased, subdued him into stillness as he pleased, and Alfred knew he was a perfect partner by the open expression he caught on Arthur's face. 

It was only a dance. Alfred took a breath of frosted air, and Ivan murmured that the party was impressive, and a delight to attend. 

Alfred could face him then, could meet him eye to eye and chest to chest and hip to hip and toe to toe, and their steps were timed like clockwork, like an old rusted counter polished back to new life. 

Ivan spun him rapidly beneath his arm and released him with a snap of his wrist. 

Ivan thanked whatever gods might be that he had the willpower to give the boy a choice, because Alfred was so beautiful alone. He was so stunningly fragile for all his power, a tiny bird with wet wings yet to harden into flight. He danced like the flame of his lighter, with a luster that Ivan, for all his skill, had never possessed. 

Alfred’s eyes were closed, and his pink lips parted as he twirled. Ivan stepped around him, turning Alfred into a dizzying flash of white and black and gold-- gorgeous, magnificent-- and distracted the crowd that stared. 

Alfred danced, sure and spinning and free and he whirled so fast he could pretend the string lights had turned into stars. 

He felt a fingertip on the leather line of his belt and landed without question in Ivan’s arms—but there was no impact, and Ivan tangled their feet and wrapped cool fingers around the back of his neck and dared him to plunge deeper. 

The black jacket slipped through his fingers. His nails grazed smooth, cool wood. Alfred exhaled, and he was tilted at the wrong angle with the floor, and he clung to nothing, and he dangled on air and faith. 

Another beat. Another baited moment. A second Ivan provided for him to catch his breath. 

It was only a dance, Alfred thought, like that last night in Moscow had just been one more mistake.

He lifted his hand without bothering to open his eyes, and Ivan pulled him back to safety.

Alfred regretted the final cadence. Russia slowed his movements, dragged them both unwillingly back to Earth. 

Ivan laid the bridge of his nose on Alfred’s, and they swayed until after silence had taken them, until after the music was gone. 

And stopped. 

Alfred realized both he and Ivan were breathing heavily, eyes locked. Inches away. He thought absurdly that he didn’t want to stop dancing, to face the reality that waited to accuse him, didn’t want to meet the eyes that had witnessed their entire exchange. 

Utter silence settled around the apartment. Alfred didn’t think he could hear anyone breathing. 

The room knew, he thought. The room had been suspicious before anyone had arrived to the party. They had hidden less than they'd thought. 

Maybe that was why Russia hadn't pressed him to reveal their rapport, Alfred realized. Because Russia knew he would have made a fool of himself. 

He lowered his arms, and suddenly Alfred was alone. 

Ivan lowered his head in a formal bow, the kind he had not offered to Francis. Alfred would not see the difference, but the elder nations would, and they would know that Ivan had staked his claim on Alfred with intentions to court. He supposed Alfred would be manic if he knew, and was amused by the thought. 

Nine months ago, Alfred had met him head-to-head. He had faced down the possibilities, dared Ivan to break him, had acknowledged the advantage Ivan held over him: that Alfred was a child, and he wanted to be beloved. That Ivan knew. Nine months ago, Alfred had offered himself on a silver platter for Ivan’s consumption. He had decided then, before he’d even crossed the door, what he was willing to sacrifice for a night of almost-make-believe. Nine months ago, Alfred had been ready for the devouring. 

He had broken the seal, had sipped the nectar, but Alfred had so much more to give. He had sipped alongside Ivan, and had likewise become addicted to the taste of the sympathy they’d shared, raw and aching for its newness. 

He’d hidden his sweetness so completely from the world, but Alfred could not hide from him. His fingers worried his sleeve; he ground his back teeth behind his charming smile; he reached upward to the missing wire frame of his glasses. 

Applause began with the polite Ludwig, and rose to cheering thunder. They had shared with the world so much more than a dance, Ivan knew as the cheering rose in volume; they had shared cooperation between the two great world powers, a few minutes of valuable peace, and a glimpse of the truth that Russia could, in some small way, control America's fervent antics. Perhaps no two nationheads had learned the same lesson from the evening's most unexpected events. What an interesting night. How delighted he was to have been asked so sweetly, hidden from prying eyes in the UN hall, to attend. 

Ivan reached into his coat. Alfred took his glasses gratefully back. 

“Thank you, young sir.” He laid heavy inflection on the reminder of Alfred’s age. “A pleasure.”

“You know, Mister Braginsky,” Alfred said softly through the din as he replaced his glasses on his nose, “I think I’ve realized something interesting.”

Ivan rose and lifted an eyebrow, unable to control the expression on his face. “Oh?”

Alfred’s grin faded. He searched Ivan’s face. “They spent a lot of time keeping us angry, didn't they? But look now." He took a step closer in the guise of shaking his hand and whispered, "They don't even know what they want."

Ivan’s blood stuttered in his veins with the shock, itching. He struggled to contain himself, took Alfred's warm hand. 

In front of the world, Alfred had come back to him, had stood warm and receptive in his arms, and had been willing to divest himself of his heroic disguise in favor of honesty. Ivan had proven in front of all that he had gained Alfred's fickle faith, and that information was invaluable. 

But what was more, he thought, was that Alfred was apparently making decisions, was considering his values, weighing his precious morals against the reality he’d bought with blood. 

Perhaps, Ivan thought with his heart in his throat, he had been silent for the last long months because he reconsidered his objectives, his desires. He still intended to use Russia for his needs, for whatever goal America considered the end of the game they played.

Finally, proof that Alfred could recognize the future which waited for them to arrive. He released Alfred's hand with reluctance. “Da, Fredka.”

"So." Alfred tilted his head, smirked, looked up at Ivan through the hair that had been gelled when the evening began. "What do you think of the party?" 

Ivan couldn't fight his smile. The boy was so damned endearing, so painfully handsome. A luxury nation borne from the blood of natives and the sharp-toothed spirit of opportunism. And a fine dancer. "I am very impressed with you, Mister Jones."

“You can book the flight," Alfred said. "I'll go with you." 

Ivan's heart flipped in his chest and lay relieved and bleeding. Ivan felt the expession on his face and was not surprised that Alfred promptly turned crimson. 

Francis traced his bottom lip with a fingernail, watching with old, old eyes.


	4. Author's note: Not giving up!

Hey Rusame fans!

A quick update: I am working on the next chapter as I write this! I haven't stopped writing this work; I've just found a way to improve the ending of the RDtM section, so of course I must. 

Thank you for your patience and for all the wonderful comments!


	5. Champagne

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'The Union told him about a loaded gun and then a long fall at the end of a tether and then a cold death of exposure; a happy accident. He told him about a failed economy, a revolution, and the fall of a king, and Alfred listened closely to the comparisons the Union made. Ivan mentioned an uncertain future, and Alfred nodded his sympathies. 
> 
> “Do you remember New York? Right after I hit my Depression, before you had to—go?”'
> 
> Is it really RusAme if no one plays Russian Roulette?

 

The party chattered from the salon, diverted by anticipation of his next entertainment. The kitchen was dark and quiet, a blessing until he could stop heaving into the sink.

 

He was drunk, Alfred thought, staring into the drain. He was drunk from the party and drunk on the holiday and drunk from the flask Ivan slipped into his hand after the dance, and then again, and then again.

 

He braced himself against chrome, pressed his other hand flat to his upset stomach. He willed sugar and cream and liquor to stay where it belonged. The polite kitchen orderlies who had left at sundown would not appreciate his bile. Had he remembered to tip? 

 

A sudden shadow obscured the light from the doorway. “Hey, bud?”

 

Alfred fought down a dry heave. His throat was tight, his neck tense when he turned. “Hey.”

 

Matthew was large and dark against the windows, taller and wider than Alfred would have liked. He padded across the tile, tie hung loosely around his shoulders. “How you doing?”

 

Alfred nodded, swallowed another nauseas wave.

 

Matthew set a hip against the sink. He cocked his head, sympathetic, and red caught a few stray hairs which had escaped his bun. “Maybe you should go lie down. I can send people home. Or Arthur can.”

 

His eyes were paler, Alfred thought. A softer purple than Ivan’s eyes. He shook his head, squinted up at him. “I got it. Just gimme a minute.”

 

When his stock had crashed to mark his first real depression, Matthew had come to him with a head cocked and cautious hands open to comfort. He had been uncertain, Alfred remembered, but that he was willing to bridge the connection between them had meant the world. Especially when the world had been so willing to bare its teeth.

 

He had been a two-dimensional character, he thought dully, a facsimile of lies and smiles. He made promises, feigned confidence that things always got better, that tomorrow was always kinder. _Don’t you worry, citizens. Work as hard as you can and save what money you can and wear out the soles of your shoes on streets that can’t nurture you. Give me your blood, sweat, and tears; don’t expect a life in return._

 

He lied to his people, he lied to his bosses, he lied to the League of Nations. _No, he wasn’t worried. Yes, he was aware that the failure of his economy had affected the globe. Yes, he knew his allies were disappointed. Yes, he knew that he’d ruined the world and deserved the blame._

 

“Here.” Matthew opened a cabinet with a whisper, reached for a clean glass. “Drink some water, keep the other stuff down. Drink slow.”

 

The water seemed to dance before striking the basin. Alfred concentrated wholly on filling the glass. When he lifted the cup for a sip, his unrolled sleeve was soaked.

 

“I said slow, bud.” Matthew rubbed calming circles into his back. “I didn’t think you drank that much.”

 

_Herbert—good old Hoover—pulled him aside for a handshake before he left, a clasp on the arm in what Alfred had thought must be an apology. He had tried to laugh, to assure him that all would be well, but found himself out of smiles and out of lies and out of hope, and he could say nothing to Herbert at all._

_He wandered after dinner to the corpse of what had been one of the prominent banks in New York. He had never felt quite the hopelessness that swallowed him then, wrapped in a falling night that smelled like oil and rot. Streetlamps cast the empty building into harsh light, and he settled himself on the brick road, in the shadow of his failure, where he was certain he belonged._

_A newspaper flapped, stuck in the gutter, and he didn’t dare read the front article. He again had failed to finish his dinner, and Alfred knew even then that the only dog which didn’t eat was a dead one. He had thought that he was Icarus, and the sun had turned to face him. He remembered that the world spun, his heart beat too fast: he was sick on the ground between his legs. He vomited nothing. There was nothing in his stomach to vomit._

_He had pulled his faithful friend from its holster and stared down the barrel. He'd wished more than anything that a bullet from his own hand could do the deed. He thought of blue flowers and friends long gone. He had hated himself for his cowardice._

 

_A thin stray cat hissed and streaked into the night, startled by an intruder Alfred had not expected to see._

 

“Christ, I feel like dogshit.” Alfred took in a deep breath, half-drowned at the bottom of another glass. “Russia slipped me a bunch of shots.”

 

“Oh.” Matthew made a displeased noise. “What a surprise.”

 

_Those intense eyes had taken in the scene: white snowfall, crusted sleeves, red-rimmed eyes, and a loaded gun. Silence had weighed heavy between them._

_And then Alfred had held out the pistol and made a request. The Soviet Union denied him with a shake of his head and a wave of his hand, and Alfred called him a few vulgar names. Braginski was unfazed._

 

“Yeah.” Alfred sighed, pressed two fingers into his eyes hard enough to see stars. “I need you to call me in a couple of days.”

 

“Sure,” Matthew said simply. “Why?”

 

Alfred pulled his glasses from his nose. “I told him I’d go back to Moscow.”

 

_The Union told him about a loaded gun and then a long fall at the end of a tether and then a cold death of exposure; a happy accident. He told him about a failed economy, a revolution, and the fall of a king, and Alfred listened closely to the comparisons the Union made. Ivan mentioned an uncertain future, and Alfred nodded his sympathies._

_The Union told him about a nation ostracized and hated, feared and demonized, demoralized and weary. He told him about a nation with ambition and with charisma. A nation with a clever tongue and shoulders that grew broader by the year. A young man who had once shared dreams of reaching the stars._

They had shared liquor from the same flask that the Federation had sipped after their waltz and had gone their separate ways. Alfred had never returned for the lonely cat.  

 

Matthew paused. “Ah.”

 

It had been the last story, Alfred thought as he settled the wire frame back onto his nose, that Ivan had ever told him. On that lonely night, he had seen the last remnants of what Imperial Russia had once been. If he’d known, he would have said—something. Thank you, or good luck. He would have said goodbye, at least. “We’ll leave right after the party, I figure. He’s not going to give me a chance to change my mind if he can help it.”

 

His brother laid a cold palm on the back of his neck, pressed the pads of his fingers into the tense muscle at the base of his head. “Maybe stop drinking.”

 

Alfred closed his eyes to concentrate on the relief in his brother’s hand. “Yeah, maybe.”

 

Matthew chose his words. “What do you think he’s going to do?”

 

Alfred thought of bunched sheets, of staring at one another in silence the morning after. He released another breath, a sigh that felt like surrender. “I don’t know. I never know.”

 

“Should you maybe stay here? He can always call you.”

 

Alfred let the world tilt—and pressed his cheek into his brother’s solid shoulder, felt the floor steady beneath his feet.

 

He closed his eyes. “I could.”

 

Matthew stroked the length of his neck, cupped Alfred’s head in his hand. His brother shrank by an inch a year, he thought; he was nice to hold. Hot. “Did you ever apologize?”

 

Alfred nodded, heard the fabric of his brother’s dress shirt slide over his skin. “That was the second dance.”

 

Matthew pressed a kiss to the top of his head, rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Good. I’m glad you decided to be an adult.”

 

Alfred snorted, unwilling to open his eyes to the bright light. “What am I doing, Matt?”

 

Matthew hid his smile in his brother’s rough hair. “Being stubborn. Nobody’s surprised.”

 

Alfred felt himself soften, felt tension drip from his shoulders. He wrapped an arm around his brother’s waist, clung to his scarred old belt, the one he’d bought him. He should send him a new one. “I’m tired, man.”

 

“Don’t say that.” Matthew laid his chin on his brother’s head, gazed into the empty room. “You’re okay.”

 

“Sixty years,” he muttered into his brother’s shirt.

 

Matthew rocked him. “You could come over to my place. Key still works.”

 

Alfred ran a fingernail over a chip in the leather, melancholy. “I want to.”

 

He’d admitted weakness, he thought, during their dance, and Ivan had scented his blood like a predator. He stayed in his eye line all night, caught his gaze and held until Alfred was torn away for some other thing. He laid a finger on the curve of his back or brushed a curled knuckle down the length of his arm. He lowered his head to hide the drink he pressed into the palm of his hand.

 

Ivan was relentless. He wanted Alfred to face that horrible impending thing that sat with them in twisted sheets after their last meeting in Moscow, that Alfred had felt on his back when he showered, that he had watched descend from the kitchen ceiling to hang between them the morning after.

 

If he was lucky, he thought, all Ivan wanted was a good fuck. “I wonder what he wants.”

 

“I mean, maybe he misses your friends-with-benefits thing. I can’t imagine people are lined up for him.” Matthew mused from above him, hesitated. “Well, maybe not.”

 

“He could just fuck me here, yeah.” Alfred considered pulling away from his brother’s support and decided otherwise. “Maybe it’s a control thing.”

 

“He’s not dumb enough to try that at your place, is he? I didn’t think anybody was.”

 

Shadows blacked out the light. Dining room chairs scraped the rug. Ludwig muttered that he’d carry more than his share; Francis twittered.

 

Alfred mourned the loss of a quiet moment. He shoved himself off of his brother, reached for the glass to fill it a third time. “No, he’s not. That’s what worries me.”

 

Matthew watched him quaff water. “It’ll be okay.”

 

Alfred nodded, set the glass on the counter with a final sigh. “It’s not a big deal. I’ll figure it out.”

 

There was a bone-rattling boom. A sudden flash of crimson light from the window.

 

Fitting, Alfred thought wryly. Crimson was the essence of their next fun family activity. “Don’t sit next to me.”

 

Matthew’s tone was dry. “We could also play charades.”

 

“Not now, we can’t.” Alfred gave him a sardonic look. “Where were you when I was blackout an hour ago?”

 

There was a second explosion, a fizzling golden rain in the dining room windows.

 

His brother crossed his arms. “Handing Arthur a penalty.”

 

“Hand him a drink,” Alfred muttered as he passed. “Keep him out of the way.”

 

Matthew called after him. “That is not how we handle the people we care about.”

 

“Look, fireworks.” Alfred caught the frame of the doorway and turned to point with an exaggerated grin. “Be a doll and make a pot of coffee, yeah?”

 

Matthew wrapped his hands in his sleeves and watched him disappear.

 

Papa, he thought, played a fickle game.

 

\-----

 

Pinwheels of color crowned the largest tree in gold; amber glinted from crystal ornaments and silver tinsel. The tree cast a shadow over the empty dance floor, reached into the vacant theatre and its flickering screens.

 

Alfred cracked the balcony door, sent a wave of mist from the heated pool to scatter over snow. “Hey, you ready?”

 

Ivan shifted a wide shoulder. Strings of lights colored his pale hair. He pointed, spoke around the filter of the cigarette in his teeth and tossed a match into the steaming water. “This is stupid.”

 

Alfred could hear music, a pop cover with a bass line that carried into the crowds from the hotel across the road. He closed the door, wrapped held himself against the chill. He left a path from the warmth of the apartment to the rail where Ivan stood.

 

“It’s just a like a hot spring, dude.” He thanked himself for water-sealing his shoes and laid his arms on the iced rail for balance. “I’ll have you back over sometime. It’s rad when it’s cold like this.”

 

Ivan cast an eye over him: hair mussed by the wind that tightened its cold fist around the building; crisp white sleeves pressed and rumpled; cheeks red with drunkenness. Shivering with cold. Eyes shadowed in his face. “You look terrible.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

“Too much of the beast for the youngling this evening.”

 

Alfred scrubbed his fingers together to warm them, raised an eyebrow. “Which beast? The whiskey or the bear with the gun?”

 

Ivan mimicked Alfred’s pose, cocked a hip. “Perhaps both, if I was a bold man.”

 

“Too bad you’re not, right?” A frozen wind curled inside his collar. Alfred bit down on the tongue that lay thick and heavy in his mouth. “It’s a good thing we’re both so demure.”

 

Ivan clasped his hands, suspended high above the city, and gazed into the sky. “I have found you both obedient and demure.”

 

Actually, Alfred thought, all jokes aside: Ivan was kind of decorous. Quiet, modest, a little shy. Reserved in conversation, private in company. Well-dressed. He was a classy European lady. A seven-foot-tall classy European lady with a Nagant in a body holster.

 

Laughter felt good. Laughter was soothing. The sound echoed merrily back from the buildings around them, and Alfred let himself laugh until he didn’t need to laugh anymore, until the street was blurred with tears and his unsettled stomach ached with the effort.

 

Ivan took a drag and frowned at the stars while he hooted, wiped his eyes.

 

Below the apartment, the streets were noisy and bright with phosphorescent light. Crowds in glowing bracelets and coats and scarves packed the streets, waved luminescent cell phones, pushed and pulled, laughed and cheered through the end of the old year.

 

Alfred cleared his throat. “So do you have it on you?”

 

The cigarette’s cherry flame left streaks of light against the skyline. Ivan pulled his coat aside to reveal his gun, fastened and secured in its hidden holster.

 

Moscow dangled over the edge of the balcony. A gust of wind sent the scarf to tangle in the railing, to brush Alfred’s shoes. Ivan kept his voice low, his body language calm, the gun in sight. “We could dance again, instead.”

 

Alfred watched the scarf undulate on the wind, wondered if it knew it was touching him. “That’s old news.”

 

Ivan ashed his Sobranie on the heads of the people below, eyebrows raised at the street. “Why, then?”

 

Alfred sighed, scrubbed his head in both hands. He was tired. He was so tired. Drunk and too tired to worry about trivial details like consequences. “Do you remember New York? Right after I hit my Depression, before you had to—go?”

 

Ivan hummed. “I remember when this city was five.”

 

Alfred ran his tongue over dry, numb lips. “I never said—thank you. For stopping to talk to me. I know you probably had a lot on your mind.”

 

Ivan paused, cigarette in the air.

 

“I don’t know where you were with things,” Alfred gestured vaguely at the street. “I’m sure it wasn’t good. But you saw me having a rough time and you came by to help. I appreciate it.”

 

Ivan took a calming drag.

 

“I, uh.” Alfred forced out the words, thought that they tasted like bile and whiskey. “Sometimes I feel like that was the last time I saw you.”

 

Tobacco proved again unhelpful. Ivan pulled the cigarette out of his mouth.

 

“I think you think it’s all been one smooth transition—or maybe not, I don’t know—but that’s not what I saw.” Alfred couldn’t look up at him. “I didn’t know the other guy. He was walking around in your skin.”

 

Alfred looked so very close to tears—Alfred, tears—that Ivan wanted to take the boy into his arms and hold him, wanted to wrap him in safety and sympathy and love—but Alfred wasn’t ready, and Ivan had no resolve to push him until the capricious boy was safely on his soil.

 

He extended his fingers, followed the railing. He curled his smallest finger, brushed the back of Alfred’s palm and carefully held his cigarette so as not to burn. “Is this how I will earn your forgiveness, Alfred?”

 

Alfred watched their fingers. He shook his head. “No.”

 

Ivan trailed the fingers of his other hand along his sleeve, a long line to draw Alfred into his arms. “Then how? Tell me, and I will follow.”

 

“It’s not about that.” Alfred reached out to push Moscow back into place. It wasn’t Ivan’s forgiveness, he thought, that he needed to earn. Maybe it was his own. “I really thought—I was sure somebody’d say something.” 

 

Alfred’s strong hands were warm, so warm. Ivan looked deliberately down at the gun. “Who among them would be such a fool?”

 

Alfred asked the gun, “Did you get tickets to Moscow?”

 

 A rumble: “I have upheld my end.”

 

Alfred spread his hands, followed Ivan’s bulk into the wings of his duster. He looked up, through the hair that hung over his eyes and into violet light.

 

Ivan inhales into the press of his fingers, deliberate and smooth. Vinyl caught at his fingernail, ridged and stiff. Then plastic, and the cold brass release.

 

The click of the button startled them both.

 

Ivan caught his arm, closed iron fingers around the soaked edge of his sleeve. “Alfred. Fedya.”

 

Ivan trapped his arm between his body and a firm grip, and Alfred knew better than to start a struggle this far above the ground. He opened his free hand, smoothed Ivan’s shirt under his palm. “If you’re going to take me back to that place, Ivan, I deserve a little recompense.”   

 

The buckles of their belts met. Ivan kept his hold, barely. Damn the boy.

 

“This is easy. We’ve done this a dozen times.” Alfred kept his voice low. “One more. One more, and I’ll let you take me back to Moscow.”

 

Ivan’s expression was intense, unforgiving, chilling. He stared down at him with a concentration that lifted the hairs on the back of Alfred’s neck, that took him back to the first moment, the first taste.

 

In the palm of his hand was the grip of the gun. “I won’t even argue. I’m way too drunk.”

 

The Soviet Union had crazy eyes. Crazy eyes and cracked white lips and long, reaching fingers. He concealed his madness behind a shined black brim, like he could hide the chaos in his head.

 

The Union’s staring had been so unsettling because no one had ever looked at Alfred with that kind of arrogant interest before Ivan. It was the hunger that refused to stay dormant in Russia’s soil, the desire for expansion and conquest that he carried in the marrow of his bones and in the hearts of the people who lived in his streets like blood cells lived in his veins.

 

In that way, he and Ivan had always been kin, in whatever forms they had taken. They were both defiant until the very end. They shared a love of living, a fascination for the big beautiful world that only managed kindness to one of them. They both felt a deep need to know more, to grow more and eat more and live more until they knew everything there was to know, had done everything there was to do. Had seen every corner of the grand universe around them. Had owned every piece of the Earth that had birthed them.

 

“You know me.” Alfred slipped his fingers half an inch under Moscow’s protective folds- and was surprised when Ivan allowed the invasion. “I’m real careful.”

 

Ivan followed the line of his belt with heavy fingers, laid a large hand on his back to pull, to press their belts together again. Just for a breathtaking moment.

 

Their noses brushed, and Alfred murmured, “You want me thousands of miles inland?”

 

Ivan’s voice was deep, defeated, and he sent a breath of cold over Alfred’s lower lip. “Alfred.”

 

A brush of lips, not quite a kiss. “Don’t you want me back in your bed?”

 

A long glide, the hiss of steel and leather. The Nagant, foreign in his hand, free from its holster.

 

Adrenaline flashed in his belly. Alfred released a hoarse breath, sent their tangled hair to dancing. Ivan’s eyes were bright, so clear, and he performed the finishing blow. “Don’t you want me to sing for you, Vanya?”

 

He took a final step inside the frame of Ivan’s shoes, pressed himself to his front, and Ivan made an expression that looked absurdly like pain.

 

He opened his arms. Let Alfred take his gun. Let him go.

 

The Federation didn’t try to hold him. He watched Alfred back away with an expression raw and heavy and lined with age and grief. Ivan looked at him like Alfred was the only source of warmth he’d ever known, and Alfred thought he’d never seen anything so horrible. He knew that expression, had seen it on a familiar face on a muddy, rainy day.

 

He could still remember the blood on his musket. For a transcendent moment, Alfred wondered if Ivan’s changing names had ever meant anything at all.

 

He released a breath, lowered his eyes. “Don’t look at me like that.”

 

Soon, he thought, soon Alfred would again be where all things good and right belonged: wrapped the comforts of a warm blanket and sweet nothings. Soon Alfred would be on Moscow’s weary soil, in his arms where he was blushed and gentle and quiet. There he would lay beside him, and Ivan would plead the angel’s lenience, and he would confess. He would finally confess.

 

Thirty thousand feet would separate Alfred from his misgivings, and then they would finally be together. He had only to wait, only a little longer.

 

Ivan lowered his head, curled his fingers around the palm Alfred had left to rest beneath his collar. “You know better than to ask for such mercies from me.”

 

A pointed clearing of the throat.

 

Alfred jumped, shoved Ivan, slipped and caught himself on the railing.

 

Scowled. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

 

Francis batted his eyes, trailed his fingers over frosted glass. “ _Mon_ sweet _lapin, monsieur_. You have whetted our appetites, gentlemen. Will you leave us unsatisfied?”

 

Alfred covered the gun with his hands as if to hide the evidence. “We’re coming, Francis. We’re a little tense.”

 

“So are we.” His father displayed himself flamboyantly on the doorframe where his expensive shoes weren’t drenched in snow. “We can’t all find relief on the balcony.”

 

Ivan closed his eyes, counted to ten. “Do not tell stories, Francis, or I will come for you.”

 

Alfred sucked on his teeth, counted bullets in the chamber. It was a great gun, and they only needed one bullet. Ivan probably wouldn’t be too mad if he used one.

 

“Ah,” Francis arched an eyebrow, “we are rarely so defensive, Ivan. Perhaps our little _lapin_ is growing into a man after all.”

 

Alfred was crimson. He could feel it. One little bullet. He wasn’t sure who he’d shoot.  

 

Ivan watched Alfred with his gun, the way Moscow reached timidly for his shoes.

 

Alfred glanced up at him, blushed and fierce. He was so stunning, so fiercely determined with his eyebrows drawn and his mouth hard in thought. Ivan was close enough to touch, close enough to take the boy up in his arms.

 

Ivan denied the impulse to take the boy’s head in his hand, to lean down and kiss the mouth that so bravely had ended their feuding. “Only a moment in time, Francis.”

 

 “Forgive me, monsieur,” Francis laid his chin on a fist, “but I cannot tell the difference.”

 

Alfred said plainly, “I am holding a gun.”

 

Francis fled.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone for all of your patience!


	6. Coffee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'It might have been divine intervention, Alfred thought, if he’d ever trusted fate.'

A pot of coffee and what he assumed was tea waited on a twin doily pair at the edge of the low salon table. Matthew had politely set out coasters for mugs, and hot drinks steamed in the low light from the theatre. The Nagant sat on the table like a macabre centerpiece.

 

Alfred glanced around the circle: Ludwig and Gilbert, opposite partners on either end of the small rug; Poland and Toris, half in each other’s laps; and on the couch behind himself, Francis, Matthew, and Arthur, who was as drunk as Alfred himself.

 

He pointed as he extended his legs over the rug. “Toris, grab some paper from the piano over there. Lud’s got a pen.”

 

Toris hurried to obey. Ludwig offered a pen from his pocket, nodded to Toris’ thanks. No one saw Alfred’s friendly tap of the toe on Ivan’s hip, or the flash of blue to violet as Ivan pulled the crystal ashtray closer with a finger.

 

Alfred dipped his fingers into the inner pocket of his jacket. “Standard rules. We fire one chamber at a time. We get one spin per game.”

 

He set his elbow on the table, held the zippo over the gun in two fingers, and gestured at the cigarette in Ivan’s mouth. “Only at ourselves, never at each other.”

 

Ivan paused, unlit Sobranie between his teeth. Alfred lifted his eyebrows, tilted his head; a lock of hair fell over his face. Even shadowed and pale, he was alluring, Ivan thought. What he was to become in maturity, only time would tell.

 

He extended his cigarette, watched the paper catch to smoke.

 

A movement in the corner of his eye: The Beilschmidt brothers shared a sharp look across the table.

 

He slid his gun toward Gilbert, flicked his eye toward Ludwig for Alfred’s benefit.  

 

Eyes on the lighter’s flame, Alfred said, “Count out one for us, would you, Gil?”

 

In the theatre, a Novosibirsk host brushed gathered snow and blond locks from the padded shoulders of her coat. A tree with blue lights and a red star stood beside her, stark against steel buildings. A twelve-hour countdown to midnight ticked in the corner of the screen.

 

Ivan took a long, red drag and nodded his thanks as he reached for the filter.

 

Alfred snapped the lighter closed with a flick of his wrist, returned his toy to a pocket.

 

A student adjusted his scarf around his jacket, nodded in agreement with the interviewer’s polite questions. The horses of the Brandenburg Gate stood tall and proud, their rider triumphantly layered in the colors of the morning sun.

 

Gilbert emptied six brass soldiers onto the table with a sound that sent the hair on Alfred’s neck to attention in the terse quiet of the room, and Ivan lifted his cigarette with two fingers to exhale a plume of white, spiced smoke.

 

The Champs-Elysées was a spectacle in glittering white spotlights from below and above. Afternoon sunlight caught strings of garland hung between its wide arches. Impeccably dressed citizens passed beneath. A blue France24 banner hung on the bottom of the screen.

 

Francis fanned himself with an embroidered kerchief unfolded from his pocket. Behind the silk, he watched Ivan’s eyes and the way they watched Alfred: the mouth, the throat, the fingers in his coat. The mouth.

 

A reporter on the edge of the Thames shielded his microphone from the sleet. He gestured at the London Eye and Big Ben, clock face yellow as the sun rose orange and red. He wished the United States well in their celebrations. 

 

Arthur tapped his shoe against Alfred’s shoulder; a reminder that come what may, he wasn’t alone. He stared at Braginski, but the barbarian only watched Alfred with a twisted eye and a hunger that he knew.

 

Gilbert turned the gun for all to see. He reloaded one bullet and returned the gun to Ivan’s open hand.

 

Alfred closed his jacket to Ivan’s searching looks with a pointed eyebrow. They’d already given Francis a show, apparently. He wasn’t running that kind of club. “If we hit five blanks, we have to stop.”

 

Ludwig tumbled a coin between his knuckles. “Why?”

 

Alfred took a warming drink. “Ivan’s still convinced God can see him.”

 

Ivan showed his teeth around the filter, released twin streaks of smoke.

 

Toris straightened his jacket, eyes on Ivan’s cigarette.

 

Ludwig examined the coin. “Has the game ever progressed as such?”

 

Alfred shook his head, took a deep breath of steam. One more game. Worst case scenario, Ivan put a bullet in his brain and woke up in time for breakfast. None of them stayed dead long. Not the old ones. He wasn’t even certain a bullet alone could kill Ivan, anyway. The old bastard refused to stay dead. “Nope. Ivan never spins, though.”

 

The host in New York beamed through bright red lipstick. She pointed at the color and chaos of Times Square, at the Waterford beacon above the streets, the half a million attendees in half a million flamboyant coats and scarves that Alfred had seen from the balcony. People wore electric lights around their necks, glowing bracelets, earrings that rang like bells. Fireworks exploded half a second behind the display in the wide windows.

 

Alfred said, “Flip it.”

 

Ludwig’s euro caught a glimpse of white light before settling to rest on the table. “Number.”

 

A rocket exploded and dissolved into white nothing.

 

Alfred pulled his glasses from his nose, folded the frame, and offered it over his head for Matthew to hold. God knew what would happen if he bloodied Texas.

 

He extended a hand through Ivan’s smoke. “Good luck, sir.”

 

Ivan shook once. His bass voice was rough, honest in familiar company. “And to you, boy.”

 

The gun clicked on glass when Ivan lifted it from the table. The lack of recognition on his face when he pulled the trigger, Alfred thought, was deeply disturbing. He was glad the child nations were gone for the evening.

 

Toris said, “One.”

 

Ivan offered the gun handle-first over the table, a courteous gentleman. The metal was cold, the handle wet with melted frost.

 

Alfred pressed the barrel to his jugular vein.

 

Squeezed.

 

_Click._

 

Arthur began to tap his foot again, anxious against his arm.

 

Toris made a note on the paper pad folded against his knee. “That’s two.”

 

A fizzle in yellow from the window colored the gun black.

 

Ivan pulled the trigger. Offered the gun. Took a polite sip of tea. Toris caught his eye, and he gave an old friend a civil nod through a curled finger of smoke.

 

Alfred watched him toss hair out of his eyes. He remembered Ivan in the final months of collapse. He kept himself quiet in meetings, showed his teeth to private thoughts no one had the courage to disturb, and often left early without excusing himself. Alfred remembered sickly yellow skin around his fingers and split fingernails. And the ligature marks beneath his gloves the other nationheads pretended not to see.

 

He pressed the barrel to his jaw, warm now with his own heat. The hammer struck nothing. _Click_.

 

He remembered the phone call, remembered mouthing the strange words ‘Belavezha Accords’ to himself as he jotted notes on the first piece of paper he could find. He remembered the way his gut had clenched staring down at his notes— _the Soviet Union has ceased to exist as a subject of geopolitical reality_ — and he remembered closing the paper in a tight fist, shoving it into the book where he kept everything important.

 

Ivan smiled at Toris and pulled the trigger. Arthur muttered a curse where a bullet might have been.

 

Toris pulled his collar tight, trapped in Ivan’s stare. “That’s four.”

 

Alfred watched Toris over his tea. The motion when he swallowed. The long fingers he curled at his throat. The fingernail that caught on the knot in his tie.

 

Ludwig shifted in his seat. “You should stop playing.”

 

Ivan stared at Toris, uninterested in their game, and he wasn’t having fun, either. Alfred remembered the night he’d finally cracked and flown to Moscow, wandered far outside the city to meet him. The air had smelled sharply of cold and exhaust and the occasional breath of cigarette smoke left by warehouse personnel. The snow did not glint prettily in the lights; it absorbed the glow of the towering work lamps and the stars as if hungry for what little warmth they could provide. The sky was black, blacker than he’d ever seen, and fresh white flakes drifted to the ground in solid sheets that stubbornly refused to melt. The silence had been uncanny.

 

He tapped his toe against Ivan’s hip. Ivan freed Toris from his gaze to glance at him from beneath a fringe of white.

 

Alfred lifted an eyebrow. He set his coffee on the rug by his hip and happened—circumstance—to look up at Toris, then back at Ivan.

 

If he closed his eyes, Ivan could see Alfred’s body sprawled over his brother’s legs, his father’s fine silk dyed eternally red with fiery blood. He could see molars exposed to the air, his sharp tongue hanging limp from the hole a bullet left behind. Alfred’s handsome face reduced to an exit wound, however briefly, was a sordid and sobering thought.

 

Alfred’s message was clear. Ivan handed him the gun and a smile draped in indulgence.

 

When Alfred reached out to take the handle, he stayed his hand to spin the chamber, and hoped that Alfred understood.

 

Alfred might have been made of stone, as unforgiving as he had been on the balcony before they began to play their last deadly game. He stared at Ivan, grim and unmoving, as the chamber slowed to a stop.

 

“Forgive me.” Ivan leaned over the table to murmur, to soothe his unpredictable flower from whatever irritation had struck him, or perhaps from the game itself. “I have no desire to share my bullets.”

 

Gilbert leapt to his feet with a shout.

 

Alfred jolted, startled.

 

Ivan closed his fingers around Alfred’s fist to shove the gun downward, lest Alfred forget his training and pull the trigger at the wrong moment.

 

Poland dragged Toris into the theatre, and the pen and pad landed facedown on the rug.

 

The countdown began with ten, and their game was mercifully abandoned.

 

Alfred stared out the window at fireworks and light. In those horrible moments in Moscow, he’d remembered the day they’d met, the Civil War, the Depression, the Cuban crisis. He’d relived dozens of long walks alongside amber fields, relearned the simple children's songs Ivan taught him, re-penned every letter. His heart bled, ached, and cried out for an end to the fighting at almost any cost.

 

The crowd counted nine seconds to midnight.

 

Alfred’s neck prickled, and he looked up through limp, gelled hair to find Ivan’s eyes on his face.

 

There was something familiar about that violet light. He remembered thinking that Imperial Russia’s eyes seemed strange the first day they’d met, the day he’d reached out with a clammy hand to shake in a room full of men who each tried to outlive his paltry legacy. There was something about the color then, something that Soviet Russia had tried so hard to hide. Maybe from the rest of them, maybe from himself.

 

Eight. Ivan let him go.

 

Humanity kept itself in balance, he thought. Balance in technology, in warfare, in media, in education, in progress. They, too, were part of the balance, part of the natural state of things. That they would fight made perfect sense; and in the grand scheme of things, that they would end made sense too. No empire had ever lasted forever.

 

He was fortunate neither his nor Russia’s administration had been willing to take the step into warfare when things went cold. He was fortunate for the wiser minds around him, the ones who gave him tight-lipped smiles and told him that losing friends was a part of growing, and offered him a cup of warm milk with honey and spices.

 

Seven. The Nagant was heavy, very heavy. This was the gun which the Soviet Union had pressed to his temple, cold enough to burn. He’d pulled an empty trigger and laughed when Alfred jumped.

 

He followed the chamber’s edge with a finger. He had sent over aid when all was said and done. Not because he had hoped to be friends. He had wanted to finally reach some kind of closure, to forgive himself for the Soviet Union’s suffering. For losing his chance to say goodbye to an old friend who owed him nothing when he stopped to talk him out of giving up.

 

Six. The lights had dimmed, impeccable on their digital timer. Blacklight threw the apartment into photo-negative. Flashing strobes confused the eye.

 

Russia’s civil war had not been akin to his own. He couldn’t have saved Ivan from the ravages of communism or of time, and he should never have tried. It was never his business.

 

He had blamed himself, Alfred understood in epiphany, and that was so stupid. What could he have done, but to be there when Ivan needed help the most and all of his followers had deserted him?

 

Five. The cheering was earsplitting. Ivan had outfitted his Nagant to be silenced, he remembered, and Ivan watched him over his tea with a tranquility that could only be sincere.

 

No two empires had ever managed harmony. Empires weren’t made that way, and it was cruelty that their personifications could feel human emotions. It was by god’s wrath that Artie and Francis could still glance around an empty room for one another. It was a brutality that Poland could remember every occupation he’d ever suffered. It was cruelty that they could feel both the ravages of economic depression and the miseries of human grief.

 

He thought of Ivan’s bedroom. He had been so honest, so careful where he put his hands. He had been so patient. He had been so gentle. What was waiting for him in Moscow this time? What did Ivan plan to do with him now?

 

Four. Ivan knew what he’d done, Alfred thought, and snorted.

 

He thought of Ivan’s last story, a comfort Alfred neither expected nor deserved. He thought of the puddle of vomit between his shoes, the glint of his pistol in the streetlights. Ivan had refused then to even take the gun. What had he known then? What was he afraid he might do? What could have been so precious that he refused to even take a chance?

 

Three. The room flashed a dozen cacophonous colors and voices; firecrackers and plastic lights and Christmas strings confused the lines between light and shadow.

 

He thought of their dance, the hanging moment after the music was gone, when they had swayed together in the silence with eyes locked and fingers intertwined. Even the molecules in the air had stopped in time. The universe, tired with its cruelty, gifted them one sweet moment of total peace.

 

He hadn’t cared what the other nationheads thought, he remembered solemnly. He had just been sorry to hear the end of the song, had been sorry to trade the light behind Ivan’s vivid royal gaze for anything else.

 

Two.

 

In the darkness between flashes of light, he was certain no one saw him adjust the chamber.

 

Ivan smiled at him with something like real warmth, unfazed and unchanged; a man who had seen too much sorrow to fear anything on the other side of life.

 

Alfred aimed the old iron sight right between those brilliant eyes.

 

Arthur surged to his feet—

 

Francis leapt from the couch—

 

Ludwig’s chair bounced on the rug—

 

Alfred said, “ _Do svidaniya_ , _komissar_.”

 

The penthouse exploded.

 

The lights burst into dozens of tinted bulbs. Confetti drifted from the rafters, layered over coats and chairs, on the nationheads, in their hair. Citizens below screamed over the speakers. Nationheads jumped up and down to make the floor shake, shouted and congratulated in foreign, friendly tongues.

 

Matthew and Ludwig rolled, struggling. Matthew’s bared teeth were silver in the blacklight, the whites of his eyes wild. He was huge, half-shadowed and eerily alike to his Siberian kin, who sat against the couch without flinching, tea in hand.

 

Ludwig had leapt for the gun, Alfred thought, but Matthew had protected his brother. It was a good thing Poland and Toris had moved, or Matthew would have taken out three instead of one to keep the gun in Alfred’s play. He was a good kid.

 

Matthew hit Ludwig in the jaw with a dull _thud_ , and Ivan held out a flat hand over glass and metallic paper.

 

Tea soaked into his slacks. The pot lay in pieces in the shattered remains of the table. Alfred dropped an unused bullet into his palm.

 

Ludwig held up both pale hands, unwilling to fight and apologetic for his misunderstanding of the moment. Matthew released his collar and stood.

 

A slip of red drifted from the rafters to land in Ivan’s pale palm beside the stolen soldier.

 

Like a joke, Alfred thought as his frantic heart began to slow, and thought of Saturday morning cartoons and toy guns. He was shaking. His entire body was shaking, but he tried to smile. “’A war cannot be fought half-heartedly.’”

 

Ivan smiled at him as if he had followed some unspoken script, some unwritten treaty. “’Only a fool wants a war.’”

 

Alfred lifted his mug. The drink shivered in its porcelain. He wasn’t embarrassed. Ivan would understand. Ivan already knew. Through the lump in his throat, he said, “To your health, Mister Braginski.”

 

He wanted to cry. He wanted to run down the street and cheer. He needed some sleep. In Russian, he added, “ _Glory to the conqueror._ ”

 

Ivan tilted his head. He tapped his teacup to the side of Alfred’s mug. “To your health, Mister Jones. Freedom or death.”

 

Eyes locked, they drank.

 

It might have been divine intervention, Alfred thought, if he’d ever trusted fate. What a way to ring in the coming spring.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year, everyone! My best wishes and hopes for you all.


	7. Teryoshka

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It was the peace stolen from them at conception. It was the gift that they had been able to give one another, no matter how the world turned. It was irreplaceable."

Snow drifted past the windows to sleep thick and white against the sill. Frost clung to the pane. Evening daylight cast crystalline shadows over the curl of the curtain. The console blinked a green reminder that night was soon to arrive, and that the unforgiving storm would be quick to follow. Children shouted to one another across the street, toothless insults and laughter.

 

Ivan re-crossed his legs on the coffee table, reached for the bottle he’d left on the floor. He turned a page and began the next paragraph. He hoped the children would be safe in bed before gray clouds arrived to cover the land. He would crack the door soon to call out to them, to send them home to the warmth of their beds.

 

The television flickered in silence, confused inky shadows with its fleeting glow: blue, red, white. A burst of color caught wire frames; the cartoon on the screen reflected in clear glass.

 

The red reflection of his blanket obscured blue eyes. Painted white stars saw themselves in the shined lenses. Alfred fumbled his toes in his flamboyant socks and shoved the wire frame up his nose with a finger as he stared down at his reader.

 

A spangled pillow rested beneath his arm.   He'd carried it onto the plane from his Manhattan penthouse without explanation or apology.

 

Ivan counted the pattern of his breathing, even and serene. The dimple in his cheek, faded in a rare moment of repose. A haystack of un-gelled golden hair, carelessly—handsomely—mussed, still dripping from his shower.

 

His home lay heavy beneath a blanket of snow and a twilight Ivan had seen tens of thousands of times—but the living room burst with blue and red cartoons and the bright white of Alfred’s reader, and the lovely brown of the shadowed limbs of trees against the curtain, and the laughter of children. The fumble of Alfred’s socks; the click of Alfred’s fingernail against the screen. The occasional clearing of Alfred’s throat.

 

He returned to his book before he caught the boy’s quick attention, before he disturbed the peace that had laid to rest on the sofa between them.

 

Alfred had entertained long after the sun had risen—yellow, even in the dead of winter—over the tired crowds of Manhattan. He saw each of his guests out of the elevator with a friendly wave; or even, Ivan noticed with perverse jealousy, an earnest embrace.

 

Ivan scowled at his fingers until Alfred reappeared in the empty theatre to murmur around his father’s snoring deadweight that he’d return, and that he and Ivan would depart together.

 

Ivan was old, and Ivan could be very patient. He and the smiling yellow sun watched from the balcony as Alfred’s guests staggered back across the street: Ludwig and Gilbert weaved, drunk and laughing, giddy with one another’s company; Feliks pulled Toris by the arm.

 

Toris had torn the right sleeve of his suit. Such thoughtlessness, Ivan had thought, was unlike vigilant Toris. Feliks was a waste of his efforts. How unfortunate that White Russia had no interest; but then, Natalya did only as she pleased.

 

He busied himself with locked doors—heavy locks, well-made—and offices which Alfred kept empty of secrets. On the second floor he found over a dozen guest bedrooms—and one snoring privateer who lay messily on the duvet where Alfred had dropped him.

 

He stood over Kirkland's unconscious figure and imagined how the overconfident pirate might struggle if Ivan laid both hands over his head and waited for breath to lay stale in his lungs.

 

But Alfred loved his mother, so Ivan dipped the fingers of Arthur’s right hand in the cup by the bedside and left him to soil the sheets.

 

Alfred met him in the hallway with red eyes and a faded smile and a packed suitcase. He wore jeans and a cotton shirt and peculiar socks and held himself when he asked Ivan if he still wanted company.

 

The fool slept on the airplane, pale and limp. Ivan wondered how long his anxiety had run unchecked to waste away at the pads of muscle beneath his shirt.

 

When their second flight crossed into the Bering Strait, Alfred woke with a start. Ivan was struck with his moment of waking: when his yellow hair was unkept and his clear eyes fogged with the sweet dreams of the innocent, and he smiled simply, honestly. Then Alfred had the audacity to bare his midriff, to torment him with glances of the enticing bronze flesh between his hips as he stretched.

 

Their airplane touched down on the sleeping soil of his house, and Ivan felt the land rise to welcome him home. Both Alfred and Ivan were hungover and drowsy, complacent when they crossed the threshold. Alfred watched Ivan lock the door and mentioned the comforts of a hot shower. Perhaps he had assumed that the water from the tap would hide the sounds of his sickened retching.

 

He was wrong. Ivan made him a sweet tea and a plate of rye with jam and left the meal on the table, available the moment Alfred reemerged, refreshed, from the steam. 

 

Alfred liked his piroshki, he thought as he stared absently at the page. He would make them with beef and cabbage, and gravy. Alfred would eat, and Ivan would ensure that he was calm enough to accept the nourishment without rushing to the washroom.

 

He would give as much as Alfred would allow himself to take. More.

 

 Ivan turned another page, absorbed in private thoughts. Alfred watched him in the reflection on his reader's protective casing.

 

The book Ivan held in his lap had been sitting on the cushion when they’d arrived, brushing snow from their coats, to the foyer. The title was Slavic: an old, thread-bound compendium of folk tales, the kind used to comfort children as they laid down to sleep. He could make out unfamiliar handwriting in the margins. The scribbles were effeminate, messy.

 

When home alone, Alfred liked to turn on every light in his apartment. He opened windows and doors and played loud music, turned on every television. He thrived on sound and movement, the conflict between news stations, the cell phone ringing in his breast pocket. He liked the life of it, the reminders that the world turned around him.

 

A loaf of bread sat on a platter on the low table with a jar of jam and a mug, steaming with bitter black leaves. The bread was dark. Ivan liked the basics, that old-fashioned food without much in it.

 

Maybe his stomach could handle a simple rye loaf. After a moment’s hesitation, he took a piece for a cautious nibble and glanced around the room as he waited for his stomach to rebel.

 

There was no light, not from candles or fluorescent bulbs. The room was so quiet he could hear every turning page, every gust of the wind outside. The cotton of his socks as he scrubbed his feet together for warmth. His cartoon was grainy with its age, but muted color played on the wood of the table, the hallway arch, the paintings on the wall in the foyer.  

 

 There had been no phone calls, no visitors, no interruptions to the peace since he'd arrived. Something about the dark and the silent had grown on him. He was warm from a hot shower and comforted by the smell of his own shampoo on the pillowcase Sealand had made.

 

It was cozy, he thought as he reached for another morsel, to sit in the flickering of the television while the house slept around him, buried in white slush. The bread was good, and his stomach responded well to simple food and some peace and quiet.

 

Mattie’s blanket slumped around his lap as he sat to stretch and groan. He shoved Texas out of the way so he could scrub his eyes with his knuckle and nod at the scarred cover of the book. “What’s that? More poetry?”

 

“Stories.” Ivan glanced at him through his hair, at the bread in his fingers and then at his exposed socks. “My sister gave it to me.”

 

Alfred popped the bread in his mouth and brushed crumbs from his hands and onto the plate. “That thing looks older than me.”

 

The binding creaked. “She liked to read to me stories on my birthday. She gifted this, so I have them to read myself.”

 

“Sweet of her.” A car passed in the street to send a wash of light around the edges of the curtain. “Which one’s your favorite?”

 

Ivan lifted the book. “This?”

 

“Yeah.” Alfred ripped another piece of rye in half and gestured with the handful before he shoved it into his mouth. “Which one’s your favorite?”

 

Ivan tilted his head in thought, and Alfred realized that his hair had grown. The white curtain was long, even a little shaggy.

 

Ukraine used cut it, he thought gloomily as he chewed. Maybe Francis would be willing to help, if he pouted a little when he asked.

 

Ivan spread his fingers over the index, thoughtful. “Teryoshka, I think. It is the story of a little wooden boy who grows tall and strong, and makes friends who help him return home.”

 

“Cool. 'Teryoshka'.” Someone laughed outside, and the sound was reassuring. Children of every nation, Alfred thought, all sounded the same. Francis would tell him there was a lesson to be learned in that. “Can you translate? I love folk stories.”

 

If Alfred would stay calm, Ivan thought, he would eat. Alfred liked his food, and after voiding his stomach of alcohol, he seemed willing enough to nibble on bread. Perhaps a distraction was enough to calm them both.

 

He nodded at the plate. “Eat.”

 

Alfred tore another piece from the loaf.

 

Ivan turned pages. “Eat the jam.”

 

Alfred dipped the knife. Teryoshka, he saw, was marked with a scrap of blue cloth.

 

Ivan laid the marker carefully on his thigh, smoothed the fabric over his slacks, and began:

 

“One old man and his wife lived on a wet hill. They had no children, and they were very lonely. One day, to calm down the sobbing of his woman, the old man took his knife to form a piece of wood. He formed the wood like a little child, wrapped it, and gave it to her.”

 

The glow of a headlight caught his face, and Alfred realized with some surprise that Ivan’s eyelashes weren’t white—they were silver. Each lash cast a shadow over his cheekbone, little soldiers at attention in the last light of the day.

 

“Before the moon rose, the wood changed into a real child, who grew into a large and clever boy. The woman rocked the wooden boy and sang:

 

_Close your pretty eyes, Teryoshka,_

_Sleep, my darling child!_

_All the fishes and the thrushes,_

_All the hares and foxes wild_

_Have gone bye-bye in the forest,_

_Sleep, my darling child!_

And before the moon rose,” Ivan glanced upward to see if Alfred was paying attention, “the wood changed into a real child, who grew into a big and clever boy.”

 

His cartoon ended, and the flicker of the screen fell into black. Green light from the console and brown from the street cast earthy tones over the shadows, illuminated the hard lines of Russia’s face.

 

 Alfred thought of violet and royal blue lights in the sky not far from where they sat.  He reached for the mug, pleased to find that the porcelain was still warm, and turned off his reader with a tap of his finger. Dark fingers reached for him: the kitchen, the hallway, the yawning bedroom.  

 

“So the man made a boat for him, painted the boat white and painted red oars so that the boy could row. Teryoshka he put in the boat and said: “My little white boat, do as I wish. And take me to where there is a lot of fish.”

 

Ivan stroked the threadbare pages as turned from one to the next. “One day, a wicked witch saw that Teryoshka’s mother would stand upon the wet hill and call him to the shore. And so, she waited for Teryoshka to row out to fish, and came to the bank and sang in her ugly voice:

 

_Come and eat your lunch, Teryoshka sonny! There’s milk and curds, and bread and honey!_

But Teryoshka knew it was not his mother’s voice and urged his small white boat to take him far from the land. The witch ran to the blacksmith and told him to re-fashion her throat so that her voice would sound as sweet as that of Teryoshka’s mother.”

 

“That’s a theme,” Alfred interrupted as he tossed his reader at the table. “There’s another story where a wolf does that.”

 

Ivan tilted his head, eyed the blanket slumped around his waist. “A wolf and three children.”

 

Steam tickled his nose. “The blacksmith kills the wolf with a hammer, right?”

 

Ivan returned to the book. “It was a wicked wolf. Teryoshka thought his mother was calling, for the voice he heard was sweet like hers, and paddled his red oars to the land. The witch stuffed him in a bag and carried him to her cottage in the forest.”

 

Russia dipped his head as he followed a line, and his uncut hair fell over his eyes. His voice, rough and rhythmic, carried the cadence of a familiar song. “The witch told her daughter to light the stove and fry Teryoshka for dinner. Her daughter lit the fire very hot and ordered Teryoshka to lie down on the shovel. But he sat instead, and threw out his arms and legs, and no matter how hard she tried, the witch’s daughter could not force him into the oven.”

 

Ivan glanced upward, at the blanket that Alfred had not bothered to wrap around his waist to shelter himself from the chill. Faint light from the moon kissed his profile, shaded his cheek. Glinted from his glasses, his Texas.

 

Alfred lowered the tea, sent his tongue over his lower lip after a drop. “What?”

 

He itched to touch, to wrap Alfred in warmth, to protect the nation with molten blood from the cold of his house. Ivan followed the curl of Alfred’s long legs beneath the blanket, folded as far from Ivan as he could manage in the space between them.

 

He returned to reading. “’I told you to lie flat,’ said the witch’s daughter. ‘But I don’t know how!’ Teryoshka replied. ‘You will have to show me!’ And so, the witch’s daughter lay down on the shovel like a dog or cat lay, and Teryoshka quickly pushed her into the oven and closed the oven door. He ran outside and climbed to the top of an old oak tree.

 

“When the witch returned home, she opened the oven and devoured her daughter, and picked the bone. When she was finished, she came outside and rolled on the grass and chanted, ‘I’ll take a roll, and I’ll take a loll. With Teryoshka’s meat I’m good and full!’”

 

Alfred swallowed, and tea warmed his stomach. “Jesus.”

 

Ivan laid his free hand on the couch beside his hip, smallest finger on the hem of the blanket. “Teryoshka called from the top of the old oak tree, ‘You are full of your daughter’s meat!’ and the witch looked up to see him sitting in the tree. She threw herself at the tree and tried to bite it across, but her teeth were not sharp enough, and she broke them all. So the witch ran again to the blacksmith.”

 

Alfred sipped. Did Ivan realize he’d set his left hand down inches from his foot? “Did it not occur to her to climb the tree?”

 

Ivan ignored him. “So the witch ran again to the blacksmith and said, ‘Make me iron teeth, and quickly, for I must eat!’ And the blacksmith made her iron teeth, and she went back to bite the oak tree through. The tree creaked, and Teryoshka was afraid.”

 

Alfred extended his legs, just a few inches, to the space below Ivan’s outstretched arm. His heart beat a little too fast for the peace of the house. “I’d be pretty intimidated if I saw someone eat a tree raw.”

 

Ivan paused his reading to send him a look over the couch, eyebrow arched. “This is much more stimulating with you than my sisters.”

 

“It’s the modern power move, dude.” Alfred made a toothy biting motion on the edge of his mug, a funny noise. “My men’ll be eating oak trees on the line.”

 

Ivan’s face moved, both shadowed and softly illuminated, into the kind of smile that took Alfred back to the crowded salon and a gun without bullets. To older, deeper places he chose not to remember. He smiled at him with sincere humor, and Alfred felt something rise like bile into his throat.

 

A beat of silence, a moment to smile at a friend.

 

Alfred bit down on his lower lip, broke his gaze. “I’m sorry. Go ahead.”

 

Ivan read onward. “Suddenly Teryoshka saw a flock of geese flying overhead and he begged them for help. ‘Oh, good friends, oh dear geese, take me home to my mother, please!’ But the geese replied, ‘Another flock is behind us, and we are weaker than them. They will take you away!’ And the witch smacked her lips, for the tree had begun to sway.

 

Another flock came, and Teryoshka begged, ‘Oh, good friends, oh dear geese, take me home to my mother, please!’ But the geese answered, ‘There is a young and strong bird is behind us, he will take you home!’”

 

Alfred could see the end of the chapter.

 

“A young bird came, and Teryoshka begged him, ‘You are the kindest of the three! Take me home to my mother, please!’ And the young bird took pity on Teryoshka and went down to let him climb on his back and carried him home to his mother.

 

And the two came to the cottage and alighted on the grass beneath the window. The old woman sobbed over her dinner, for she had lost her darling Teryoshka, and her husband could not console her.”

 

Wind moaned through the gutters, and Alfred hoped the children outside had returned safely home to their beds.

 

Ivan glanced upward at the curtain, and Alfred supposed he was thinking the same thing. “And Teryoshka cried from beneath the window, ‘Mama! Mama! Do not cry so! For I am here below!’

 

“And the old woman heard him, and she and the old man ran into the street, and seeing Teryoshka, they took him to the fire to warm him, and could not kiss and hug him enough. They gave the young bird as much food and water as he could eat and drink and let him run free in the yard as he pleased.”

 

The book’s binding creaked in Ivan’s palm, cradled between long white fingers. “The young bird soon grew into a big and strong bird and grew up to lead all the flocks. He flaps his wide wings as he flies, and often remembers Teryoshka, and returns home to eat and drink and lie down in the yard.”

 

Alfred settled deeper into his pillow. His belly was warm, and the room was dim and quiet, and Ivan’s low voice was soothing in its rhythm. He could count each lazy heartbeat, could hide from the whole world, could sip tea and listen to a story and recover from his hangover.

 

There was nobody there but he and Ivan, and that was a familiar, reassuring story. Like a fairy tale. It was the peace stolen from them at conception. It was the gift that they had been able to give one another, no matter how the world turned. It was irreplaceable.

 

Ivan closed the book with a muted sound. “For he is happy there.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love folk tales from all over the world. It's true that American stories tend to be hopelessly optimistic-- which I think is charming-- and Russian folk tales tend to have more cautionary notes, which is more practical, more mirrored to real life. In either case, I think we could all use a little comfort at the start of a new year, and what's more comforting than a cup of tea, a good friend, and a fairy tale? Be comforted, people. We can do this 2019 thing.


	8. Oil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "His beauty stole the breath from Ivan’s lungs. The dreaded white flame had never burned so brightly in slumber as to cast such clear light over the moon’s face. And god, Ivan thought, surely god was gazing down at his missing angel through her. Or did Alfred glow so brightly from within that the moon herself was envious of his radiance?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe how long this project has continued! I've loved every minute of writing this, and I adore everyone who has left me comments or kudos! In answer to the messages I've received about the continuation of this story: Yes, there are two more acts like Le Toucher Doux and Right Down the Middle but, no, I'm not sure whether I'll be continuing. I'm going to take a breather after this is finished and posted, because this has been a year and a half's worth of work. This actually isn't a love story. It's the story of the end of the world as we know it and the rise the empire that takes humanity into space. Le Toucher Doux and Right Down the Middle are the prelude. 
> 
> So, if I choose not to continue with My Throne and Centuries (and their current working titles), please know that I love you all and wish you all the best, and that I've only left to pursue the intentions that brought me here in the first place. Two ships in the night and all that jazz. I've used this story to sharpen my own writing tools and to explore my writing style for my own original fiction. I've been working on that fiction for years, and I haven't yet made clear to myself whether or not I'll be able to do both of these stories at once. 
> 
> And let's be real, I'll probably be back to write more drabbles. Best of luck!

  Russia smiled down at the dark cover and spread his fingers over the title’s golden filigree. “Teryoshka was my favorite, when I was a child. My sister read it to me many times. She would tell me that Teryoshka was clever to climb the tree. He did not assume his victory.”

Ivan gazed at the table, expression empty, and Alfred felt an unpleasant and unwelcome twinge of remorse. He envisioned tiny Rus sheltered in the comfort of his sister’s skirts, wrapped in a scarf sensibly knitted too large for a growing child. He saw pink fingers follow the lines Ukraine read aloud, keratin in nails that hadn’t yet been split or yellowed by hard labor and cold. “I like it. It’s got a happy ending. Not enough of your stories have those.”

Ivan shifted a wide shoulder to lay the book on the table, folded the blue scrap—part of someone’s clothing, Alfred wondered, maybe an apron—over the cover. “I do not so much like the next part.”

“With the birds?” Alfred could see candlelight, or maybe firelight. To warm them, to scare away the beasts of the night. He caught snowy shadows on the hay where they slept. He could see little fingers reach for the Aurora Borealis, for the stars Ivan would someday claim with a scarred hand. “Maybe they were scared of Teryoshka. Maybe they were weak. They didn’t carry him because they didn’t want to find out if they were strong enough.”

Ivan watched him. “The young bird was strong.”

A sudden flurry of wind rushed past the house.

“Yeah,” Alfred said with a mouth that felt like a desert, “the young bird was strong.”

Snow-capped streetlamps glowed on the curtain, powerless to pierce the shadows of the room. The old house creaked beneath the weight of snow gathered on its gables.

Alfred watched his tea. He swallowed the bile that rose to scorch his throat. “I bet he wishes he could have gotten there sooner.”

Ivan gazed at his book of stories as if lost between the pages. Thoughtfully, over the sounds of the gathering storm, he said: “He came. He waited until he was big and strong. That was wise.”

He glanced at Alfred. “For such a young bird.”

Alfred looked away: at the window, at the hallway. At the fingernails he picked. At the floor.

Ivan watched him struggle. Unable to resist, he reached out to lay a tentative hand on his thigh beneath the blanket. “He often flies back to the fire.”

Ivan's hand was heavy through the blanket. Imperial Rus, the Soviet Union, Russia, and Ivan—Alfred could see them all in his face. For a split second, Alfred saw a pearled cuff catch the streetlights, heard the rasp of ballgowns and the strain of a ghostly string quartet, the clink of wine-stained crystal.

A second gale rattled the panes, and Alfred pulled his legs back into himself and stood.

Ivan cursed himself black for his impatience. He watched Alfred step into the hall under the guise of checking the sky in the window over the stairs.

When he lifted himself to his feet, he stepped deliberately so Alfred would hear him approach.

He stopped in the archway, where moonlight drowned them in a grey pool. If he stepped too close, would the angel open his wings to fly? "Fedya." 

Alfred turned to face him with an expression of unease, one arm crossed over his sternum. His mouth was firm, his expression grim. “Well, Teryoshka always lets him in.”

His beauty stole the breath from Ivan’s lungs. The dreaded white flame had never burned so brightly in slumber as to cast such clear light over the moon’s face. And god, Ivan thought, surely god was gazing down at his missing angel through her. Or did Alfred glow so brightly from within that the moon herself was envious of his radiance? She was only silver.

The wooden stair creaked. His heart wailed when he lifted a hand to find that Alfred did not cast open gilded wings, did not fly scornfully away.

The angel took a step closer, glanced into his empty palm, and Ivan lowered his voice to hypnotize, to keep him close. “I did not mean to offend, podsolnukh. Forgive me.”

Alabaster, Alfred thought. In moonlight, Ivan’s uncrackable marble skin turned to gauzy white alabaster, like a mineral statue with an outstretched hand. He could see lines of labor written into his palm, could see every strand of hair that caught at the folds of his scarf. Moscow draped over his shoulders like a pale cloak, like a symbol of the antediluvian blood that cooled in his veins.

He jerked his head over Ivan’s shoulder, into the darkened living room. “What’s that little blue bookmark?”

“From my sister’s dress.” Ivan told him, a living statue. “She tore it from her skirt when she left me. To have. To remember her.”

“Like your book, huh.” Alfred wondered what expression was on his face. "You have a lot of those."

Ivan longed to touch, longed to lay his hands in unprotected places, to seduce the stiffness from his Alfred’s shoulders. “Soon the oil from my hands will ruin the pages.”

“Doesn’t that just break your heart.”

“No.” Ivan said. “I have memorized the stories. It was my sister’s wish that I keep them.”

Alfred felt an immense rush of admiration for Ivan. Ivan was stronger than all of them, because even the Soviet Union had kept some ragged scrap of humanity safe in the recesses of his mind where madness, time, and manslaughter couldn’t reach. He wondered if he had the strength to shield his innocence from the atrocities Ivan had survived.

Ivan Braginski: the lonely old man who waited in the coldest corner of the world for death to claim him. The scarred commissar. One of the few among their interminable kind who still had the strength to memorize a fairy tale for the love of the sister who had taught him. God, he looked like a painting, all silver thread and silver lines.

A wave of emotion tightened his lungs, and he padded to the edge of the stair where he could meet Ivan eye-to-eye on the uneven levels. “I wanted someone to stop us.”

The flesh of his wrist was thin and clean, without a single scar, and Ivan wished it forever to be so as he lifted Alfred’s blue pulse to his lips. “I remember when New York was only ports and cotton.”

He expected Ivan to look up, to pin him with the same hypnotic stare that had stopped Toris in his tracks—but Ivan only pressed another kiss to his palm, to each of his curled fingers. Alfred swallowed hard. “Yeah.”

A slide of fabric, and Ivan took the boy’s hands, cradled his strong fingers as if he could protect him from the ones who had wounded him. Alfred’s eyes were blue, so blue. “I remember the way you used to meet me at the dock, with your shoes soaked from the foam.”

The edge of the wooden stair bit into his heels. He was fading and aching and tired, so tired. The world blurred, and he closed his eyes in a slow blink. “I know.”

“I remember when you came to me.” Ivan laid his nose alongside Alfred’s, felt the heat of his labored breathing. He could see wetness in Alfred’s eyes and wished he could soothe him. “You wanted to take me away. You wanted to save me.”

Alfred tried to breathe, to think. He didn’t want to be cruel, he didn’t; but he could feel something shifting, could smell change on the wet wind from the east. He didn’t want to be unfair, but damn it if Ivan wasn’t right. They deserved this: relief, to prove to themselves that loneliness hadn’t already killed them both. "I'm sorry."

Ivan blinked once, and the silver of his lashes caught the moonlight. He pressed a thumb into the line of his jaw. "You carried me."

Alfred decided with finality that he hated himself. He wrapped both hands around the thickness of Ivan’s neck, his shoulders; the places where the worst of his scars had endured. “The bird would hate Teryoshka if he tried to put him in a cage.”

“It is the wide wings of his bird that Teryoshka admires, and the passion by which he leads his flock.” Ivan’s voice caught, rough as a rockslide. “What does it matter where winter freezes the land, if roses grow in spring?”

They carried the weight of the world, Alfred thought, and what did the rest of the Earth offer them for their sacrifices, for their effort? None of them knew the difference between war and peace. If they did, their dance would have incited panic instead of applause.

He pressed their foreheads together. Alfred stared miserably into those piercing eyes. Maybe it was time, after a year of hiding, to give up the ghost and face the demons.

So he just asked him, plain and simple: “What do you want from me, Braginski?”

Ivan said, in a voice that sounded like a gust from the street: “Stay.”

He couldn’t move.

Alfred released a startled laugh, an uncertain glance at the window. Had he seen something move in the glass? “What?”

“Stay with me.” An angel fell from glory into his arms, and Ivan had only to offer his penance, to supplicate the seraph. He had nothing left but to ask, and hear the answer. His heart, his desperate heart cried out for Alfred’s mercy, for his pity. “Be mine.”

Alfred dragged in a breath of cold air. The wind outside had changed direction. He knew it had. He'd seen the unnatural pattern of the snow beyond the window. “With—what are you talking about?”

“Stay.” Ivan repeated: simply, honestly. “Stay with me, you who stayed beside me when my family left me. Come to find me, you who braved thousands of miles into my domain to steal me into your protection.”

Snowy hair was soft in his hands. Alfred took a handful and pulled. He didn’t care if it hurt. “Are you insane?”

Moscow wept, and Ivan prayed that brave Alfred wasn't intimidated by his storms. His heart would cry, if hearts did cry: he could feel that the bandages were wet.

The ache of bleeding constricted his chest, numbed his tongue, stayed his teeth of all compelling venoms. He had only his sincerity, and his love. “Hang your coat when you come to see me. When you come into my company, talk with me. Come and go as you please.”

He was overwhelmed, overburdened with the bliss of having him so close, of finally releasing the words that clung to his tongue. The words tripped forward like poetry, like breath: “I have no power to keep you.”

“That’s what you want?” A tear rolled down Alfred’s cheek, then another. “That’s why you came?”

“I will tell no one. I never do." He begged, Ivan thought, carelessly, without shame; and he was purer, cleaner, closer to God’s compassion than he had been in centuries. Alfred told no tales, had shared none of his secrets. It was not in Alfred’s nature to be cruel. "I only ask that you spurn another man’s bed. Tell me you will take no lovers, and I swear to you I will never speak a word.”

Hail tapped at the windowpanes like insistent fingers from the darkness. Alfred convinced himself that he hadn't seen a white face in the street.

Ivan swore up and down that he’d never tell a living soul how he felt, and it was unfair. It was so unfair that someone like Ivan had to promise his silence. Like he was some kind of monster. Like Ivan was so contaminated by his history that even his—his what? His gentleness? —was a sin to be indulged and then hidden from the rest of the world.

“Stay with me. Angel, beautiful thing. I ask only your time. I ask only your faithfulness.” Ivan spread his hands over that lithe waist, over his back, his tender throat. He cupped Alfred’s head in his hands, closed his eyes, and prayed. He prayed, prayed. “You have all of me. Stay with me, stay.”

Alfred’s mouth filled with salt. How conditional did Ivan think this should be? How many of Ivan’s lovers had demanded his silence?

He fisted two hands in his sweater and kissed him full on the mouth.

He knew to the depths of his soul that what they did—the melting of tension, the taste of tea, the twin sighs—it was wrong. It was wrong to pretend that they were only human, sinning in the simple ways human beings sinned. It was a game of pretend played by creatures with very real power, the kind that summoned black glass to rain down from the sky and left scars on scorched soil like testaments to some foolish nationhead’s last mistake.

What they did was not fairness or balance. It was sinful and indulgent and relieving. It was cruel and comforting. He was terrified to ruin this moment between them: this crooked, wanton, wonderful thing they did in front of God and everything else. He had never been more willing to throw himself into the pits with the devil, had never been more willing to trumpet his sins for all to hear.

“When this is over, one or both of us is dead. Swear it to me.” Alfred glared into infinite violet light. “You finish this out or you kill me here and now.”

To kill Alfred now—now, when his own confessions sprang rapturous from his tongue—now, when Alfred held him with such jealous, feverish power—now, when Alfred looked like divinity in each of its mighty forms—was not within Ivan’s capability.

The boy rested his weight against him, and Ivan felt they were dancing, if not for the vice-grip that held him immobile. “I cannot, Fedya, forgive me.”

Alfred was certain he didn't belong in this world that smelled like dust and steel, and where Ivan was outrageously regal. He would not think of firelight. No one was made of alabaster or marble. Fairy tales were not real.

He could hear his own ragged breathing. “Swear you mean it.”

“Your forgiveness.” Any lesser man would have cracked in the power of his embrace—but Alfred, Ivan could hold as tightly as he had the strength. And he did, he did. “On my house and my life, I will never speak your name.”

Alfred lifted both hands to press Moscow’s unorganized folds into order on the heavy set of Ivan’s chest where bandages covered his heart.

The left side was—wet.

Wet. Wet, warm, and Alfred thought his knees would buckle, because the cruelty of the moment hit him like a fist to the gut, and Ivan was actually bleeding while he begged.

“No, god damn you.” Alfred gripped handfuls of hair by the root, shook the man like a dog. “Swear to me you can see this through, because I can promise you, Ivan, I will kill you if you don't.”

“On all earthly things beloved.” Ivan wiped tears from Alfred face. How unfit for an angel to cry so prettily when he would promise anything, anything, if the angel would only be with him. “On my honor, on God, on every treasure of man: I will see this to the end. I know no other way, Alfred.”

The Soviet Union, upon his final days, had asked him if he knew the sound of a dying empire. He mocked Alfred with the end of England’s sovereignty, with the final days of France’s reigning monarchy. He implied that Alfred was responsible for the end of Imperial Earth, the final blow to the colonizing powers that had populated the planet so they all could live.

Alfred did something he hadn’t done in a very long time: he lowered his head and prayed for strength.

It was not England who Alfred saw to thunder his last. He knew, he thought, the sound a dying empire made. It was a roar; an echo of creaking sails and the hiss of a sword being drawn; a wail of sorrow; a cry of pain so deep he could feel it himself. It was the memory of the blade and the anchor and the ring of steel. It was a living memorial, both conscious of its ending and suffering the close. It was a booming sound, a wailing sound, a human sound. The debris left behind was the worth of the man.

“Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Alfred laid his head on Ivan’s shoulder, exhausted. Maybe they were both already lost. Maybe they were all lost. He was lost, and Ivan was bleeding, and he would do almost anything to make the pain go away. “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory of heaven.”

Let the boy pray, Ivan thought. He would lay him on the bed and savor him, would cloak him in white sheets and the light of the moon and praise him so he would unfold his petals like jasmine, so that Alfred would forget god and whisper his name instead.

Alfred wrapped his fists in the spandex beneath his sweater—

Ivan took in a breath—

Alfred lifted his feet from the floor by brute force alone.

The wall knocked the air from his lungs. Ivan had no choice but to give, to revel in the angel’s fanged demands. Alfred kissed, he claimed; he bit, felt flesh give; he drew back and punched Russia in the jaw.

Ivan’s head, a crack in the plaster.

Alfred stepped back from the landing, down into the moonlit hall. “Amen.”

He wiped silky Slavic blood from his mouth, swallowed the spice on his tongue. “That’s for taking my glasses, you domineering fuck.”

Alfred’s silver cheek, and his own blood on that full lower lip: black with shadow, glossed with moonlight. Alfred wiped his mouth with long, strong fingers, swallowed, and smiled with all of his perfect pearled teeth.

Heaven itself would war against him, for he had stolen their most beautiful angel to cradle in his own filthy hands. Ivan pressed until he could feel the bruise—bid his blood that Alfred mark him so that all could see—and licked his fingers. “I like the way you look, bare to creation.”

A grey tongue—not the right color for the living, anymore—wet Ivan’s fingers, cleaned away blood from gossamer and marble, silver thread, alabaster. Wild eyes, hunting eyes. Artist fingers curled around the final banister. Power in every line of Ivan’s body, the tilt of his shoulder as he stepped down into the hall.

Alfred took his glasses from his nose, folded them, and threw them blindly at the table.

“Let’s go,” he said, “come on.”

Ivan gathered his legs beneath him and leapt.

Moscow’s soft folds, mighty hands.

They tumbled. The table jumped. Alfred’s tea spiraled to the floor. There was a clatter and a slam, and the television rocked.

Ivan tasted like liquor and spice and iron and snow. Alfred licked an iron bead from the corner of his mouth and left a crimson smear behind. He bit down on the expanse of Ivan’s shoulder, met only a mouthful of soft cotton.

Moscow protected its master. He cracked his knuckles against Ivan’s temple instead.

Ivan backhanded him across the face. Alfred heard the sound he made.

He kicked him in the stomach, felt a grin stretch across his face. Wild, manic.

Ivan closed both hands in his jeans—Alfred took handfuls of his sweater—Ivan threw him into a world of vertigo, and Alfred hit the wall and then the hallway’s shined floor with an impact that rattled his bones.

The bathroom door struck the lock and recoiled with a gunshot slam.

The entry door shuddered in its frame.

A painting jumped from its nail and exploded over hardwood.

Alfred clutched at the paint, dragged himself to his feet, scrubbed damp hair from his eyes.

Ivan filled the kitchen doorway. He held the bottle of oil.

Alfred reached for the bottle, set his teeth to the cork. Ivan took him by the waist, cold through his shirt.

Alfred jumped with his back to the wall and spit, and the cork landed somewhere in the gloom where the sofa used to be. He tightened his thighs around Ivan’s middle, lifted himself up the plaster to reach for his hem.

Fumbling with the string. A curse. Helpful hands.

The frantic ring of Ivan’s buckle. The button. The fly.

Oil cascaded onto hardwood, caught silver splendor as it fell from white fingers. The bottle rolled to a stop; oil pooled like liquid moonlight.

Alfred took a handful of hair in one hand, his scarf in the other, bared bloody teeth.

"Come on, you son of a bitch," he said, “come on."

Ivan saw that his fingers left oil banners on the paint.

Teeth. Copper and salt. Hip to hip, chest to chest, eye to eye.

Ah, that sweet, guttural sound torn from between perfect teeth. Eyebrows met on his handsome, bruised face. Beautiful blue eyes cast to the ceiling; diamond tears on a golden throat.

Look at me, Ivan whispered into the mouth that sighed, "look at me.”

“God,” Alfred managed, “Christ Jesus, god save me.”

Ivan dropped to his knees, and his house thundered with their combined weight. He murmured praises, pleas for forgiveness; he prayed for mercy. For his tithes he moved long and smooth and watched Alfred unwind like a broken spring, like petals to light.

The scarf warm around his shoulders, their shoulders. Ivan, cool and sturdy and massive above him; foreign, ancient worlds around them. He was surrounded, Alfred thought, surrounded in the cradle of the world and in Ivan’s arms, chilled by currents rolling inland from the Black Sea and pinned by the weight of the land. Moscow roared around them like a living thing, and for half a moment he thought he was part of Ivan’s province, a piece of the empire.

_Come on, come on._

Glass cut his wrist, a sudden sting. He felt something in the palm of his outstretched hand and opened heavy, gritty eyelids to see.

Hardwood was cold on his cheek. The frame was streaked with the blood on his hands. He brushed glass aside to flip the canvas toward the ceiling.

An image of the Earth. Oil from Ivan’s hands left a dirty watermark on the edge of Europe. His own stained fingers marked the folded southern edge of the Pacific in red.

In the scuffle they had ripped the Earth right down the middle.

"Look at me," Ivan demanded with a buck of his hips.

Oil and blood and shards of glass whispered against the floor. Alfred left scores in the wood he could hear, sang Ivan’s name to ring across the gables like a bell in the tower.

Ivan thought heaven itself screamed its jealousy on the tempest outside. He took Alfred's mouth, tasted his flavors, and Alfred reared forward to embrace him. He was warm around him, warm beneath him, radiated heat.

Alfred’s palm smacked the wood, and he twisted.

Ivan slipped on melted snow, on red glass.

He hit the floor.

Beneath.

Under.

His heart stopped in his chest. He could count the imperfections in the wooden archway, the hairs on Alfred’s head. Every cell in his body snarled to strike before he was struck, to spill the scorching blood and kill the creature.

Ivan rose to show him sharpened eyeteeth, filed for ferocity and for function. Those white teeth had pierced him and torn more than once.

It wasn’t a threat, Alfred thought, but a warning that he was ready, that he would kill at the first sign of disrespect. He laid his forehead on Ivan’s, closed his eyes. “Please, baby, I’m so careful.”

Oh, Alfred. An inexpert succubus eager to lay in his bed; a warm and willing vessel to heaven’s light come to rescue him from the corpse of another lonely night. He was so delightfully responsive, and Ivan pressed his lips to the exposed underside of his jaw. Fresh, tender, unscarred flesh, he thought, and so much hot blood beneath.

Ivan felt he was falling into blue summer. He could feel the heartbeats of old-blooded children, warm in their parents’ loving arms; could see the glimmer of pure snow on painted streets; could hear the river that whispered proverbs from its bed. Saint Petersburg sang with history from every brick, every distinctive column; the Altai mountains stretched, laughing, for the stars above. Russia was beautiful, the way Russia had always been beautiful.

A single nights’ reprieve from loneliness was a gift he had never been so freely offered, not from stronger hands than his own. Alfred would not ask, in the morning, for reparations for his sympathy. Alfred was too generous. Alfred was a good man. He had always been kind.

Ivan prayed to any merciful god that he could keep this moment, this untainted memory to hold close to his heart for the rest of his excruciating eternity. He wanted to speak—so desperately wanted to speak the words that Saint Petersburg and the river and the moon sang in his ear— but a millennium’s bitter weight sat on his tongue, and Ivan could not find words. Cruelty, he thought, that he could not express to Alfred what had been given. He could only be silent and hope Alfred could understand.

Alfred watched him lower himself to the ground, and his hysterical heart missed a beat, stumbled back into rhythm. He wasn't stupid. Imperial Rus could never have laid down beneath anyone. The Soviet Union could never have shown so much faith in another man. But Russia—Ivan—rested on Moscow’s protective folds and gritted his teeth. He gave himself away.

“Ivan,” he heard, “my god.”

Ivan couldn’t close his eyes, but he could watch Alfred’s face as he pleasured them both. He could wrap his hands around Alfred’s hips to enjoy every moment of Alfred’s clumsy exploration. He was inexperienced and awkward, dripping with blood and sweat and melted snow. Ivan taught him the movements with careful hands.

Clenched in the hand on his chest was the painting of the planet that Latvia had once given him, a goodwill gift of watercolor and canvas. The delicate paint ran with crimson tracks of blood and grey sludge, ruined and ragged.

Ivan reached for its remains before the paint could stain his hair.

Distracted, Alfred opened his eyes to watch him pull the other half of the planet from beneath shards of glass and balsam wood.

His stomach clenched. He thought he could hear something coming, something that sounded like a foghorn and an earthquake. He thought he had heard the sound before, the distinctive sound of something coming to an end.

Ivan rose to meet him.

Gloom oozed from the darkest corners of the house to color him black. Moscow slithered through the windows to take him. Ivan glowed, bare-toothed in the moonlight to push back the shadows, the reaching fingers of streetlights and black branches and frost.

He could feel cold blood, and he pressed his own heat into Ivan’s lap to warm them. It was almost easy, Alfred marveled, to hide himself in the curve of Ivan’s collarbone and open his legs for his hands to explore. Not to fear. Not to hesitate. To let it all go.

He clutched Ivan as he seized, buried his face in softness. He crushed half the earth in one hand, forgotten in his abandon. When Ivan lowered his head between them, came helplessly undone, the remains of the painting ripped between his wide palm and the floor.

Shards of stained glass rocked to rest in the hallway: green with oil, red with blood, kissed silver by the moon. Moscow spread its ends wide and white. Alfred’s shadow blacked the staircase. Ivan’s name faded from the ceiling, the final bell.

The moon reached her peak. Winds died. Snow cooled the surface of the Earth.

“Look what we did,” Alfred whispered to the shivering house in its stormy eye; to powerful Russia who pressed kisses to his throat; to the silver moon in all its glory. “Ivan. Look.”

They left the Earth in pieces on the floor.


End file.
